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Onion Sauce, White
Take two Spanish onions or four large ordinary ones. Peel them, slice off the ends, and simmer them until tender in as much cold water as will cover them. Drain the water from them, mince them finely, and put them into a saucepan with a pint of milk mixed smoothly with two ounces of flour and two ounces of fresh butter, a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Stir the sauce over the fire for ten or fifteen minutes, and serve it as hot as possible. Time, about an hour and a half. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for six persons.
A thick white onion sauce of the kind meant to be ladled over boiled mutton or roast lamb. The method is unusual in that the flour goes into the cold milk rather than into melted butter, which works perfectly well provided the sauce is stirred hard as it comes to the boil.
- The hinge: cook the flour outTwo ounces of flour in a pint of milk thickens within a minute or two of boiling, but it will taste pasty unless it simmers on. The ten to fifteen minutes of stirring is not optional; keep the heat low enough that the milk does not catch on the bottom.
- Imperial pintA British pint is 20 fl oz, about 570 ml, not the American 16 oz. With 2 oz (55 g) flour and 2 oz butter to that quantity, this is a heavy coating sauce. Slacken it with more milk if you want something pourable.
- Spanish onionsStill sold under that name, and still the right choice: large, pale, mild and sweet. Four "large ordinary" onions means four ordinary brown cooking onions; either option comes to somewhere in the region of 1 lb 8 oz to 2 lb (700-900 g) peeled, though the recipe gives no weights.
- Simmer, then drainBoiling the onions in plain water and throwing the water away is deliberate. It strips the harsh sulphur notes and leaves sweetness. Twenty to thirty minutes covered is enough for tenderness; the recipe's ninety minutes is total elapsed time including the sauce.
- Texture"Mince them finely" means chopped small by hand or pushed through a sieve, giving a slightly rough sauce. A blender will give a smooth purée instead, which is a different and perfectly good result but not what the book describes.
- SeasoningNutmeg with milk and onion is common in Victorian white sauces and worth keeping, but grate it sparingly. The recipe salts at the outset, with the milk; if you prefer, check the seasoning again once it has thickened.
- Serving hotA flour-thickened milk sauce skins over almost immediately. Make it last, or hold it with a butter paper pressed on the surface and a whisk through it before it goes to the table.
- Yield and costSix servings as an accompaniment. The 8d costing is a Victorian retail figure and has no modern equivalent worth calculating.
White onion sauce belongs to the family of milk-and-flour sauces that ran through nineteenth-century English cooking, all of them variations on the same b u00e9chamel principle absorbed from French practice and thoroughly domesticated. Its usual partner was boiled leg of mutton, a dish so standard in Victorian households that the sauce was often listed simply as "onion sauce" with the mutton understood; it was also served with roast lamb, boiled rabbit and tripe. The preliminary boiling and draining of the onions reflects a period taste for mildness: strong onion flavour was thought coarse at table, and the technique of parboiling to tame it was applied to onions in soups, stuffings and pur",...}<br>Ignore that.{