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Onion Sauce, Young
Peel half a pint of medium-sized button-onions, and throw them into cold water for half an hour. Boil them until they are tender with out being broken, then stir them into half a pint of melted butter; add a little salt, pepper, grated nutmeg, and two table-spoonfuls of thick cream. Serve very hot. Time, about half an hour to boil the onions. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A short Victorian sauce for boiled mutton or poultry, and one that hinges entirely on knowing what "melted butter" meant in a British kitchen of this period.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn nineteenth-century English cookery melted butter is a flour-thickened butter sauce — roughly an ounce each of butter and flour cooked together, then let down with about half a pint of water or milk and simmered smooth. Plain molten butter will not hold the onions or the cream and the dish collapses into a greasy pool.
- Imperial measuresA half pint here is 10 fl oz, not the US 8. Half a pint of butter sauce is about 1¼ cups; half a pint of button onions is a volume measure of whole peeled onions, near enough 8 oz by weight.
- Button onionsThese are small pickling or pearl onions, an inch or so across, not spring onions. Frozen peeled pearl onions work and spare the peeling. To peel fresh ones, drop them into boiling water for a minute first and the skins slip off.
- The cold-water soakThe recipe gives no reason for the half hour in cold water; it is commonly said to freshen and mellow peeled onions. With modern onions it does little; skip it if pressed, or use it as a convenient holding step after peeling.
- Boiling timeHalf an hour is long for small onions and risks the very breaking the recipe warns against. Start testing at 15 minutes; simmer rather than boil hard, and lift them out the moment a knife slides in with no resistance.
- Drain thoroughlyOnions carry a surprising amount of water. Let them steam dry in the colander for a minute before they go into the sauce, or the finished sauce will thin out.
- Nutmeg and creamGrate the nutmeg fresh and use a light hand — a few strokes for the whole quantity. Add the cream off direct heat at the end and warm through without boiling.
- YieldEnough for five or six as an accompanying sauce, as the recipe states. It was commonly served with boiled mutton, tripe, roast lamb or a plain boiled fowl.
Onion sauce is a long-standing fixture of English cookery, and Cassell's carries more than one version: the everyday kind made with chopped or pulped boiled onions stirred into melted butter, and this more genteel treatment in which whole button onions are kept intact and suspended in the sauce, enriched with cream and nutmeg. Onion sauce was a traditional dressing for boiled mutton. The heading "young" most likely refers to the onions rather than the cook. The costing of eightpence is characteristic of Cassell's, which gives a "probable cost" and a "sufficient for" figure for nearly every entry.