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SOUBISE SAUCE (another way)
Take a dozen white onions. After having peeled and washed them, cut them into halves, take off the tops and bottoms, mince them as fine as possible, and blanch them to make them taste sweeter and take off the green colour. Then let them pulp on a small stove with a little butter. When they are thoroughly done, and no kind of moisture is left, mix with them four spoonfuls of bchamel. Season them well, rub the puree through a tamis, and keep the sauce hot, but without boiling. You must also put a small lump of sugar with the sauce if necessary. When you have the oven hot, put in the onions hermetically closed in a small stewpan, and let them simmer for one hour with a small bit of ham. This method gives a better flavour.
A classic onion purée sauce, written in the terse professional shorthand of the period. The final two sentences are an alternative to the stovetop method rather than a continuation of it, which is worth sorting out before you start.
- Two methods, not oneThe body of the recipe sweats the minced onions in butter on the stovetop; the closing lines offer instead a covered stewpan in the oven with a piece of ham. Choose one. The recipe asks only for a hot oven and an hour, with no temperature given.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the béchamel goes in, the sauce is held hot but not simmering. Boiling a butter-and-milk onion purée splits it and dulls the sweetness the blanching was meant to build.
- "Let them pulp"This means sweat them gently in butter, covered, until they collapse to a paste with no free liquid left. Any moisture remaining will thin the finished sauce. Keep the heat low enough that they take no colour at all.
- Why blanch firstA brief plunge in boiling water pulls out the sharp sulphurous edge; the text's own stated reasons are to make the onions taste sweeter and to take off the green colour. Drain and press them dry before they meet the butter.
- "Four spoonfuls of bechamel"Genuinely ambiguous: a period spoonful in sauce work may be a tablespoon, but the scale is not fixed. Add enough to bind the onions into a thick, spoon-coating purée, and judge by consistency.
- A tamisA fine drum sieve, worked with a wooden pestle or the heel of the hand. A fine-mesh conical strainer does the same job, and a food mill or a blender followed by a strainer is faster with no loss of finish.
- White onions and the sugarOnions vary enormously in sweetness; the "small lump of sugar if necessary" is a correction, not an ingredient. Taste first, and use it only if the purée reads sharp rather than sweet.
- Yield and servingServing -- Traditionally served with lamb, mutton or roast game birds.
Soubise sauce is generally traced to the household of Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, an eighteenth-century French marshal whose kitchen, like those of several titled patrons, lent its name to a preparation the cooks themselves devised. The name attached itself firmly to onion: in French practice anything \a an onion purée, whether as a sauce like this one or as the rice-and-onion bed served under cutlets. It is a béchamel bound with a dry onion purée, and the entry's clipped style tells you it was written for cooks who already knew how to make the béchamel. The scrap of ham in the oven version lends savour without adding stock, and so without adding water to a purée that has just been carefully dried out.