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Onion Sauce, German
Peel three or four large onions. Cut them into small pieces, and boil them until tender in as much good stock as will cover them. Stir in with them, whilst boiling, a tea-spoonful of caraway-seeds. Mix two ounces of flour smoothly with two ounces of butter and a little of the hot liquid; add it to the rest, season with pepper and salt, simmer gently over the fire for ten minutes, and serve very hot. Time, one hour. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A thickened onion gravy in the German manner, distinguished from English onion sauce by the use of stock rather than milk and by the caraway. The whole thing hinges on cooking the onions long enough that they collapse into the liquid.
- QuantitiesThree or four large onions is roughly 1.5 lb peeled. Use only enough stock to cover them, or the finished sauce will be thin, since the flour and butter are fixed at 2 oz each (about 1/2 cup flour, 4 tablespoons butter).
- The thickeningFlour rubbed cold into butter and let down with hot liquid is beurre manié, not a cooked roux. Whisk it in off a hard boil, in small lumps, or it will seize into knots. The ten-minute simmer afterwards is what cooks out the raw flour taste and is not optional.
- CarawayA teaspoon of whole caraway seed in a sauce for five or six is assertive by modern palates and the seeds stay hard. Bruise them first, or tie them in muslin and lift them out before thickening if you want the flavour without the crunch.
- TextureThe recipe leaves the onions in pieces. For a smoother sauce, press through a sieve, which was the period practice for a "sauce" as opposed to a "stew"; a blender does the same job.
- TimeThe stated hour presumably covers the whole preparation, most of it the onions. Small pieces will soften in appreciably less, but do not hurry them: undercooked onion leaves a raw sharpness that the seasoning cannot cover.
- Stock"Good stock" is unspecified; a well-made meat stock, preferably unsalted, is what is wanted. A commercial cube will make the sauce salty once reduced, so season only at the end.
- ServingSufficient for five or six as written. A sauce of this kind suits plain boiled or roast meats. The 6d cost gives a sense of how cheap onion sauces were as a way of dressing plain meat.
Cassell's habitually labelled sauces by nationality, and "German" here signals two things at once: caraway, which English cookery associated with seed cake and with Central European kitchens, and a stock base rather than the milk-and-onion sauce that English cooks served with roast mutton. Caraway with onions and pork is long established across German-speaking Europe, where the seed is treated as a digestive as much as a flavouring — a belief often repeated in nineteenth-century household books, though not one with much evidence behind it. The beurre manié method, mixing raw flour with butter and slackening it with hot liquid, was one familiar English shortcut to a thickened gravy.