Boil 1 dozen small onions and 4 leeks in salted water until tender; drain. Heat 2 tablespoonfuls of butter. Stir in 1 tablespoonful of flour until smooth but not brown; then add ½ pint of rich milk; season highly with pepper, and salt to taste. Add the onions; let boil up and serve.
A plain white-sauce onion dish of the kind that filled out a Victorian supper table. Two details decide whether it works: how thoroughly the leeks are cleaned, and how far you cook the flour before the milk goes in.
- Clean the leeks properlyGrit sits between the layers and will not boil out. Split them lengthwise and rinse under running water, fanning the layers apart, before slicing into inch lengths.
- "Rich milk" and the half pint"Rich milk" in this period generally meant whole, unskimmed milk, sometimes with the creamy top of the pan included; use whole milk, or whole milk with a splash of cream. Half a US pint is 8 fl oz, or one US cup; an imperial half pint is 10 fl oz.
- Butter to flour ratioThe sauce here is deliberately loose, but that is because there is only one tablespoonful of flour to half a pint of milk, not because of the extra butter. For a sauce that clings to the onions, raise the flour to two tablespoonfuls.
- "Smooth but not brown"Cook the roux over moderate heat for a minute or two to lose the raw flour taste, but stop well short of any colour. Browning it turns this into a different, nuttier sauce and dulls the white appearance the recipe is after.
- Small onionsA dozen small onions means pickling or boiling onions, roughly 1 to 1½ inches across, so somewhere between ½ lb and 1 lb depending on size. Peel them but leave them whole. Cipollini or small shallots work.
- Boiling timeWhole small onions need 15-20 minutes in salted water to become tender through; leeks are done in 8-10. Cook them in separate batches or add the leeks late, or the leeks will collapse.
- "Season highly with pepper"This is the dish's only real flavouring beyond butter and milk, so it means considerably more pepper than usual. White pepper keeps the sauce clean-looking; a grating of nutmeg is a period-appropriate addition.
- YieldServes four as a side. Reheat gently, as the sauce will thicken and can catch.
Onions in white sauce were a fixture of nineteenth-century British and American cookery, cheap enough for everyday and bland enough to sit beside boiled or roast meat without competing with it. The "Scotch" label in a book of this kind is doing loose work: the leek is the marker, since leeks were a staple of Scottish kitchen gardens and of cock-a-leekie, the country's best-known leek dish. Books like this one, which assigned a dish from a different nation to each day of the year, leaned on a single recognisable ingredient to stand in for a whole cuisine, and the results tell you more about how such books imagined foreign cooking than about how it was actually cooked. What is genuine here is the technique: a butter-flour-milk sauce, the béchamel that entered English-language cookbooks as plain "white sauce" and became the standard vehicle for any boiled vegetable brought to the table.