Cream Onion Pie: or, Sabotage by typesetting error

I have half a mind to go to the address at the top of this recipe, bang on the door, and berate whoever answers. I want to graciously inform them that whoever lived here 90 years ago sent a terrible recipe to the newspaper and demand to know WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO DO ABOUT IT.

Philadelphia Inquirer, September 13 1935, p 12

Cream Onion Pie 3 slices bacon, diced 2 yellow onions, chopped 1 tsp sugar 1 tsp salt 1 c milk ⅛ tsp white pepper 1 tbsp butter 1 tbsp flour 1 egg, well-beaten 1 unbaked pie shell Heat oven to 350°. Fry bacon over medium heat until it is crisp and the fat has rendered off into the pan. Add the butter, stir until melted. Add onions, salt, sugar, and pepper. Mix well. Cover the pan, reduce heat to low, and let steam 8 minutes. Do not let onion brown. Then remove from heat and allow to cool. While the onions are cooling, blend flour with 2 tablespoons of the milk. Then stir the in egg and remaining milk. Set aside. Stir the egg-milk mixture into the pan. Pour into the pie crust until the filling is firm in the center and a very light brown, about 30-45 minutes. Note: If making small individual pies instead of a big one, it's easier to spoon the onions into the miniature pie shells and then pour some of the egg-milk mixture into each one. Give the milk a quick stir after each time you pour some of it out-- otherwise, the flour will settle to the bottom. Mrs. Leone P Kiefrider, 5644 Willows Ave, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, September 13 1935, p 12

I like to start off with my thoughts as I went through a recipe, but this one disappointed me too hard- especially given how much I had looked forward to it. Onions are a rare treat for me these days. No one else in the house likes them. Whenever I add half a chopped onion to a batch of soup, discontented squawking is heard. I practically have to sneak them into the house lest I hear complaints while unpacking the groceries. Can you imagine having to excise onions from your food?

As you may imagine, when everyone else announced they would be out of town for the weekend, I loaded up the grocery cart with the forbidden delights. After a long deprivation, I was prepared for Mrs. Leone P Kiefrider and the Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange to lead me to a deliriously pungent onion bender.

Let's get right to where it went wrong. This recipe, for a single pie, calls for five onions. Unless onions were a lot smaller in 1935, you can't fit five onions into one pie. I cut the recipe in half, meaning that one full pie should allegedly should contain twice as much chopped onion as the skillet below. Please note that I cut the recipe in half. Does this look like half a pie's worth of onions to you?

The bacon looks pointless.

I ignored my intuition while it shouted to me that we would soon cry harder over the failed pies than we had while chopping all the onions. Every time I think I know better than a recipe, I was wrong and the recipe was right. But every time I ignore my intuition, I was right. 

I thought the onions would shrink as they cooked, just like spinach (or like the onions that went in the Belgian onion pie). Unfortunately, I kept an open mind in the face of dubious recipe instructions, and told myself that Mrs. Leone P Kiefrider must have known what she was doing. After all, she won the $2 basket of groceries and got her recipe published in the newspaper with her name and address on it. They even gave her recipe a special mention in extra-large type:

This recipe has got to be mistyped. Remember how the Inquirer's typesetters added 100 degrees to the baking temperature for the orange raisin squares? Apparently that recipe-ruining error was not a fluke because someone ruined the Cream Onion Pie. Did the newspaper have the apprentice typesetters do the Recipe Exchange because it was the 1930s and the women's page wasn't "real" news?

All right, let's say some nice things about the recipe. To begin with, one can easily get everything ready ahead of time. You can get your eggy milk all measured and mixed, your onions chopped, your bacon diced, and your butter and seasonings measured and placed in a tiny bowl, ready to dump into the pan at the right moment, and your pie crust ready to receive. Also, three slices of bacon yields exactly enough fat to cook the onions if you're not insane enough to cram five of them into one pie. Also, I like the choice to cut the bacon up before cooking it. The little pieces of bacon confetti couldn't curl away from the pan and avoid getting cooked.

As a side note, it was really hard to come up with three slices of bacon for this recipe. Like everyone else I know, we can't open a package of bacon and only cook part of it. As soon as the smell drifts out of the kitchen (and it always does), people start nonchalantly drifting toward the frying pan and asking if we're having pancakes with that.

Also, the onions cooked perfectly when we followed Mrs. Leone P Kiefrider's instructions. We put a lid on the pan as directed, and in eight minutes the onions were perfectly cooked and not at all browned. I don't know why it's so important that we prevent browning the onions, but the recipe's onion-cooking method makes it easy to prevent a golden-colored mistake.

The bacon just looks like a puny handful of confetti.

Let's ignore the excessive onions and take a brief look at where things went right. We measured out the butter and all the seasonings ahead of time because sometimes I have foresight. The recipe calls for white pepper, which I was not planning to purchase since I would never use it again. But this turned up in the back of the closet. You will note that it is from that era when everything was covered in "genuine simulated woodgrain."

I thought that by now the white pepper had surely degraded to tasteless dust. But purely for the heck of it, I shook the canister to break up the hardened brick of pepper inside, opened it, and shoved it right under my unprepared nose. After sneezing, gasping, dabbing my eyes with a wet cloth, and blowing my nose repeatedly, I decided that the white pepper was still fit for culinary use.

Now that we've run out of nice things to say, halving this recipe meant I had to divide an egg in half. In other words, I did all the tedious business of cracking an egg into a cup, whisking it until uniform(ish), and measuring out half of it for recipe use.

I did this for nothing.

The last nice thing I can say about this recipe: everything mixed together as claimed. Here are our, um, pies.

After baking, they looked pretty cute. But when you cut into one, you found a scoop of cooked onions piled into a pie case. It's like I put sandwich toppings into individual bread bowls instead of serving dishes.

I ended up scooping the alleged pie filling back out of the pie crusts and sporadically adding it to soups and small casseroles I made for myself. It was nothing more than precooked onions in an unconvincing pie disguise anyway.

I had to give the recipe another go. That's right, we're wasting no time before we do a Second-Stab Saturday for this recipe, we're facing the onions now. 

I guessed that perhaps someone switched put a number two in the typesetting drawer that should have contained fives, and that perhaps someone glancing down only briefly while hastily assembling Mrs. Leone P Kiefrider's recipe for print wouldn't have noticed that they pulled out a 2 that looked backwards.

Looking beyond the overuse of onions in an onion pie, you could tell that the seasonings wanted to be really good in this pie. I'm sure that the delicate mix of savory bacon and surprisingly fiery white pepper would have been perfect had Mrs. Leone P Kiefrider's recipe not (presumably) been sabotaged by poor typesetting at the newspaper printing plant. And so, we made this recipe again with just two onions instead of nearly half a dozen of them.

As we stated, everything about this recipe works if you don't put half a deli's worth of onions into it. And so, we cooked the bacon, which we cut up before putting it into the pan. If you follow Mrs. Leone P Kiefrider's directions, the bacon renders out just enough grease to cook the onions, and doesn't curl away from the pan while it becomes crisp. 

I had sneak these into a tiny container the last time we cooked bacon and hide them from everyone.

And so, we added a reasonable amount of onion to this recipe. I should also note that just like the first time, we are halving this recipe. This means I had enough faith to go through the bother of dividing an egg in half again.

That looks a lot more like half a pie to me.

I mostly wanted to remake this recipe because it really seemed like it wanted to work. If we cook the onions as Mrs. Leone P Kiefrider directs, they become perfectly tender but don't get browned at all. I know they look like we cooked them to a deep golden brown, but they are actually perfectly transparent but coated with a light blessing of reddish bacon residue.

Another change we made: we allowed the onions to cool off before adding the egged milk. The last time, when we just dumped it onto our steaming hot frying pan of failure, the egg and the flour started to firm up before the pies were even their shells. This simple change allowed the pies to wait until we baked them to coagulate.

As you can see, the filling actually looked like a savory custard loaded with onions instead of like onions lightly strewn with insufficient bacon. And if you cut one in half, the little onion pies actually acted like pies instead of just spilling out onto the plate like a too-heaping helping of lightly cooked onions.

I also took the empty pie shells, rerolled them, and shook salt and Italian seasonings over them to make little crackers. Had I cut them more neatly, they would have been as cute as they were tasty.

I definitely think this recipe works better as a batch of miniature pies instead of one big one. Like those dainty little quiches you sometimes see people baking in mini-muffin pans, the onion pies were delicious but very sating. If you make one big pie instead of a lot of little ones, you'd want to cut narrow triangles.

However, I have got to find a reliable way to get these to easily come out of the pan. I had to spoon-gouge most of them out, leaving a messy pan behind.

"Oh, that'll soak right out."

The reduced-onion pies were so perfect that Mrs. Leone P Kiefrider must have intended two (maybe three) onions instead of five of the dang things. The onions were mellow and sweet, the bacon salty and savory, and the pies have just enough white pepper to make them interesting. You may think this recipe is only for people who think onions are a personality trait, but these are just really good.