Baked Onions with Cream and Thyme

There's a dish my mother used to make in the cold months that I'd forgotten about for years, until I found a line in the notebook: onions, cream, thyme, slow oven, Tuesday. That was enough. The smell came back before the method did.

Whole onions, peeled and halved, laid cut-side down in a dish with cream poured around them and a few sprigs of thyme tucked in between. Then a low oven and the better part of an hour. That's it. The cream reduces and thickens around the onions as they soften, catching the edges with gold. The thyme gives up its oils into the cream. The kitchen smells like the kind of evening where nobody is in a rush to leave the table.

This is a dish that has fallen out of fashion, which is a shame, because it belongs beside a roast chicken or a piece of simply cooked fish, or, honestly, on its own with good bread to mop up the cream. The onions go from sharp and firm to sweet and yielding, almost jammy at their centres, and the cream around them is somewhere between a sauce and a gratin. It asks very little of you. An hour of patience. A few good onions. The willingness to believe that something this simple can be worth the plate it sits on.

I've been making it again every few weeks since I rediscovered it. I wrote it down properly this time. Some things shouldn't be forgotten twice.