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Onion Sauce, White, Common
Boil the onions until tender. Mix with them half a pint of melted butter; add a quarter of a pint of new milk, and a little salt and pepper. Stir the sauce over the fire until it boils, and serve as hot as possible. Time, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 4d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A short entry that assumes two things a modern cook will not: that "melted butter" is a thickened sauce, and that everyone knows how many onions to use.
- "Melted butter" is not melted butterIn Victorian English cookery this usually means a flour-thickened butter sauce: butter cooked with a little flour and let down with water or milk. Proportions vary from book to book, so treat any ratio as a starting point. Using plain liquid butter here will give you an oily, broken sauce.
- Imperial pintsCassell's half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups; the quarter-pint of milk is 5 fl oz, about ⅔ US cup. That is 15 fl oz of liquid, so with the onions added the yield comes to roughly a pint.
- No onion quantity is givenThe original omits it entirely, as it assumes the cook knows the proportion. Three or four medium onions to a pint of finished sauce is the usual balance; more than that and it becomes an onion purée rather than a sauce.
- Boil, then drain hardOnions hold a great deal of water. Drain them thoroughly and press them, or the sauce will thin out and taste washed rather than sweet.
- Chop or sieve"Common" here probably marks this as the plain version as against a finer one, though the recipe itself says nothing about chopping or sieving. Chopping the onions small once tender helps the sauce coat rather than sit in lumps.
- Three-quarters of an hourThe book's stated time, which presumably covers boiling the onions and finishing the sauce. Quartered onions are tender in 20 to 25 minutes; long boiling only leaches out the sweetness you are after.
- "New milk"Simply fresh whole milk, as opposed to the skimmed or soured milk kept for other purposes. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- ServingEnough for five or six, and traditionally sent to table with boiled mutton, tripe, or roast rabbit. It thickens and skins as it stands, so make it last and keep it moving over the heat.
Onion sauce is a fixed point of nineteenth-century English cookery, commonly paired with boiled mutton and with rabbit. Its foundation is the sauce the English called simply "melted butter" — a flour-and-butter base that foreign cooks mocked and English cooks built half their repertoire on; this entry assumes the reader already knows it. The price note, fourpence for five or six people, marks this as an economy sauce: onions and milk were among the cheapest things a household could put on the table, and a plain boiled joint dressed with onion sauce was respectable eating well down the income scale.