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Onion Sauce, Brown
Peel and mince two moderate-sized Spanish onions very finely. Fry them in two ounces of dissolved butter until they are lightly browned. Add half a pint of brown gravy mixed smoothly with a dessert-spoonful of flour, and a little pepper and salt. Stir the sauce over the fire for a few minutes, and serve as hot as possible. Time, six or eight minutes to boil. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for four persons.
A straightforward brown onion sauce built on a gravy base rather than a roux. The only real difficulty is the browning of the onions, which the six-to-eight-minute timing understates badly.
- The hinge: brown the onions properlyThe recipe times only the boiling, not the frying. Two ounces of butter and a gentle heat will take finely minced Spanish onions to a sweet golden brown over a good deal longer than the sauce's own six to eight minutes. Rushed over high heat they scorch at the edges while staying raw and sharp inside, and the sauce turns bitter.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 285 ml or a generous cup and a quarter. The finished sauce will be thin by modern standards; reduce it a little longer if you want it to coat.
- "Brown gravy"In a book of this kind this means a made brown gravy or stock from elsewhere in the same volume, not pan drippings alone. A well-reduced dark beef or veal stock is the closest modern equivalent; a stock cube will read salty and flat against the sweet onions.
- Dessert-spoonful of flourRoughly two teaspoons. Mix it smoothly into a little of the gravy first, as directed, or it will lump on contact with hot liquid.
- "Dissolved butter"Simply melted butter, the usual nineteenth-century wording.
- Cook out the flourA few minutes over the fire is the minimum; give it five to eight at a bare simmer so the raw floury taste goes. Stir often, as the onion solids settle and catch.
- Yield and servingSufficient for four, as stated, alongside roast or boiled mutton, tripe, sausages or liver. Serve very hot, since butter-enriched flour sauces skin over quickly as they cool.
Onion sauce in British cookery divides into two branches: the pale one, onions boiled and bound with milk or a white sauce, served almost automatically with mutton and lamb, and this darker version, where the onions are browned in butter and let down with brown gravy for beef, tripe, sausages and offal. Cassell's, an encyclopaedic Victorian household dictionary, gives both because a competent cook was expected to know which sauce belonged to which joint. The specification of Spanish onions matters: they were imported large, mild and sweet, and were often favoured where onions were to be browned rather than boiled, since a strong English onion would turn acrid. The costing at sixpence is typical of the book's habit of pricing every dish, a reflection of readers running households on fixed weekly allowances and needing to know before they cooked.