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Onion Sauce
Boil three or four white onions till tender, mince fine; boil half pint milk, add butter half size of an egg, salt and pepper to taste, and stir in minced onion and a table-spoon of flour which has been moistened with milk.-E. H. W.
A plain white onion sauce of the kind meant to go over boiled mutton, roast fowl or vegetables. The proportions are sound; only the units and the order of operations need translating.
- Butter "half the size of an egg"A standard nineteenth-century measure for roughly 1 oz, or 2 tablespoons. Butter was cut from a block, not a wrapper, so cooks sized it against familiar objects.
- Half pint milkOne cup in US measure. That gives about a cup and a half of finished sauce, enough for four servings.
- White onionsOnion sizes are not specified and were not standardised; if the three or four intended here were small ones, two medium onions today is probably closer to the intent. More than that and you have onions bound with a little sauce rather than a sauce.
- Boil the onions in milk or salted waterWater is what is implied here. Simmering them in milk instead, then using that milk for the sauce, gives more onion flavour, and some later versions of the sauce are written that way.
- Cook the flour outThe tablespoon of flour slaked with cold milk will thicken but tastes raw if it goes in at the last moment. Let the sauce simmer three or four minutes after it thickens, stirring, before serving.
- Texture"Mince fine" means knife-fine, not pureed; the sauce is meant to be visibly flecked. If you want it smooth, press it through a sieve rather than blending, which turns boiled onion gluey.
- SeasoningOnion and milk both mute salt. Season at the end and taste twice. A grating of nutmeg or a scrape of mace is period-appropriate and helps a sauce this plain.
Onion sauce belongs to the family of English milk-thickened sauces that came to American cookbooks through household manuals of the early nineteenth century, alongside bread sauce and parsley sauce, and it was served most often with boiled or roast mutton and lamb. Buckeye Cookery (1877, compiled from contributions by Ohio housewives, hence the initialled attributions like E. H. W.) prints it as one of its sauces. The technique here is the pre-roux method: flour slaked in cold liquid and stirred into hot, which is simpler than cooking flour in butter first, and which persists in home cooking long after French practice had moved on.