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Onions for Seasoning Sauces and Made Dishes
Mince three or four onions very finely. Put them into a saucepan, cover them with cold water, and let them boil until quite tender. Press them with their liquid through a hair sieve, when they are ready for use. Time half an hour. Probable cost, 2d.
A working preparation rather than a dish: a plain onion purée kept on hand to thicken and flavour sauces. It takes ten minutes of attention and repays it.
- Hair sieveA sieve of woven horsehair, the Victorian equivalent of a fine nylon or stainless mesh strainer. Any fine sieve works, and a food mill or a short burst in a blender followed by straining is faster.
- Cover with cold waterUse only enough water to cover by half an inch. Too much and you finish with onion-flavoured liquid rather than a purée thick enough to bind a sauce.
- "Quite tender" means collapsingThe half hour given is closer to the mark than the modern instinct to stop at translucent. The onions should fall apart under a spoon; anything firmer will leave threads in the sieve and grit in the sauce.
- No salt, no colourNothing is seasoned and nothing is browned. The result is a neutral base for a finished sauce, so salt it in the final dish.
- YieldThree or four onions pressed through with their liquid give a thin purée. Reduce it in the pan afterwards if you want it stiffer.
- KeepingThe book assumes daily cooking and no refrigeration. Treat it as a fresh preparation: four days covered in the fridge, or freeze in ice-cube trays and drop a cube straight into a simmering sauce.
- Probable cost, 2dTwopence, in pre-decimal currency of the later nineteenth century. The figure is here because Cassell's costed almost every entry for a housekeeper working to a weekly budget.
Boiled and sieved onion is the foundation of sauce soubise, generally traced to French court cookery of the eighteenth century and carried into English professional kitchens through the nineteenth; before roux-thickened sauces became universal, sieved vegetables did much of the thickening work. It is a component, one of the small stocks and purees a well-run Victorian kitchen kept ready so that sauces could be built quickly at service. The insistence on a hair sieve reflects a period preoccupation with smoothness in a finished sauce.