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Soubise Sauce
2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 2 cups sliced onion 1/2 cup cream 1 cup white stock 1/4 teaspoon salt Few grains pepper Melt butter, add flour and seasonings, cook until smooth; add stock, one-third at a time, stirring constantly, cook all together. Cover onions with boiling water and cook five minutes; drain again, cover with boiling water and cook until tender. Pass through puree strainer and add with cream to the first mixture.
A white roux sauce enriched with onion purée — straightforward once you know what the period terms mean. The point that matters most is heat control: keep the roux pale and do not let the finished sauce boil after the cream goes in.
- Keep the roux white"cook until smooth" means only long enough to lose the raw-flour taste, over gentle heat; the recipe gives no time. Any colour at all and the sauce stops being a white sauce; soubise should be ivory.
- White stockA light, unbrowned veal or chicken stock, unsalted and barely seasoned. A good low-sodium chicken stock works; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which will muddy both colour and flavour.
- CreamPeriod "cream" varied and was not standardised; modern heavy cream (around 36% fat) is a reasonable stand-in. Light cream or half-and-half will work but gives a thinner sauce that is more likely to break if pushed to a boil.
- The double blanchingThe five-minute boil, drain, and second boil is not padding; it tames the sulphurous bite of the onions. With sweet or mild onions you can shorten the first blanch, but do not skip the drain.
- Puree strainerA food mill or a fine sieve worked with a wooden spoon. A blender or food processor is faster and gives a smoother result; press it through a sieve afterwards if you want the silkiness the original intends.
- Two cups sliced onionAbout one and a half to two medium onions. Sliced thin so they cook through in the second boil rather than staying crunchy at the core.
- FinishingAdd the cream and purée off the heat or over the lowest flame, and warm through without boiling. Taste for salt at this stage — the onion water carries none of it, and the quarter teaspoon in the roux is a starting point only.
- Yield and servingMakes roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups. It suits poached or baked white fish, but it is equally at home with lamb, veal, or eggs.
Soubise is traditionally named for Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, an eighteenth-century French marshal whose kitchen is generally credited with the onion puree that carries his name -- an attribution repeated in later sauce literature, though the documentary trail is thin. By the time this book was printed, soubise had settled into the American repertoire of "made sauces": a bechamel or veloute base with a single dominant vegetable puree stirred in. Washburn-Crosby, later General Mills, was the maker of Gold Medal flour, and collections like this one served to promote it.