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Onion Sauce (Many people are fond)
Many people are fond of a sauce of onions, which are healthy, and to most palates agreeable. If it were not for the unpleasant odor they give the breath, onions would be universally used both as food and flavoring. A sauce is made by boiling the onions, until tender, in milk and water. Drain and chop the onions fine, adding pepper and salt. Pour drawn butter over them, and add milk or cream. When the whole comes to a boil, the sauce is ready.
A brief, proportionless entry of the kind common in turn-of-the-century household books, which assumed the cook already knew how to make drawn butter. The one thing to settle before starting is what that means.
- Drawn butter is not melted butterIn American cookbooks of this period, drawn butter is a thickened sauce: about 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then whisked with a cup of hot water or milk until smooth. Simply pouring melted butter over the onions gives a greasy, broken sauce.
- Working proportionsUse 3 medium onions (roughly 12 oz), simmered in equal parts milk and water to cover, then a cup of drawn butter and 2 to 4 tablespoons more milk or cream to loosen.
- Boiling in milk and waterThe milk tempers the onion's sharpness and keeps the flesh pale. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir occasionally; milk scorches on the bottom of the pan and will taint the whole batch. Allow twenty to thirty minutes if the onions are cut up, longer for whole ones, and test before draining.
- Drain wellOnions hold a surprising amount of liquid. Drain them, then press lightly in the sieve, or the finished sauce will thin out as it stands.
- Texture"Chop fine" means fine dice, not purée; the sauce is meant to have body from the onion itself. A blender turns it into something else entirely.
- SeasoningSalt after draining, since the cooking liquid carries away some of what you put in early. White pepper keeps the sauce clean-looking if that matters to you; a scrape of nutmeg is period-appropriate.
- Bring just to a boilOnce the cream is in, take it to the boil to marry the flour and then serve. Held over heat it will thicken and eventually break.
- ServingEnough for four to six. Traditionally served with roast mutton or lamb, boiled fowl, tripe, or salt cod.
Onion sauce built on drawn butter was a workhorse of the English and American nineteenth-century table, a common accompaniment to roast mutton and boiled meats in an era when a white sauce with something chopped into it served as an everyday alternative to a long-simmered brown gravy. The entry's opening remark about breath is not a stray joke: onions carried a faint social stigma in genteel American households, and some cookbooks of the period preface them with a defence, often on the grounds of healthfulness, before giving directions. That framing, along with the absence of quantities, suggests a book written for readers who wanted reminders rather than instruction.