Onion Sauce
Boil four or five large white onions in salt and water; change the water, then drain them. Chop fine and boil with one teacup new milk, salt, pepper, and one tablespoonful pepper sauce.
Add drawn butter and serve.--Mrs. S. T.
A short, plain white sauce built on twice-boiled onions, meant to go beside boiled or roast mutton, lamb, or fowl. Two details in it need translating before you start: "new milk" and "drawn butter."
- Drawn butterThis is the hinge of the recipe and the book assumes you already know it. Nineteenth-century American drawn butter is butter melted and thickened with a little flour and water or milk; a common proportion is about 2 tablespoons butter worked with 1 tablespoon flour, let down with hot liquid and cooked a couple of minutes. It is not simply melted butter, which will break out of the sauce.
- New milkFresh whole milk, straight from the cow and unskimmed. Whole milk is the right substitute; skim will taste thin against the onions.
- A teacupPeriod teacups ran roughly 6 to 8 fluid ounces; ¾ cup is a reasonable working figure. Old teacups varied, so treat it as an approximation and adjust for the consistency you want.
- Pepper sauceA tablespoonful means the thin vinegar-and-pod pepper sauce that stood on Virginia tables, closer to pepper vinegar than to a concentrated modern hot sauce. With something like Tabasco, start with a teaspoon and taste; a full tablespoon will dominate the milk.
- Why the water is changedDraining off the first boiling water pulls out the sharp sulfur compounds and gives a mild, sweet onion. Do not skip it, and do not let the onions color at any stage — this sauce should stay white.
- Chop before, or afterBoiling whole large onions until tender takes 25 to 35 minutes; quartering them first cuts that considerably and makes the fine chopping easier. Squeeze or press the drained onions to get the water out, or the sauce will be loose.
- Final simmer"Boil with one teacup new milk" means a brief simmer to marry things, two or three minutes. A hard boil in milk risks catching and scorching on the bottom of the pan.
- YieldDepends on the size of the onions; four or five large ones with the milk and drawn butter will make well over a cupful. Serve hot; it thickens noticeably as it stands and can be thinned with a spoonful more milk.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered its contents from a long list of Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many receipts end in initials like "Mrs. S. T." rather than in full instructions — contributors wrote for readers who already knew what drawn butter was. Onion sauce itself is straightforwardly English: it belongs to the boiled-mutton tradition carried into the American South, where a mild white onion sauce and a caper or bread sauce were the usual accompaniments to plain boiled and roasted meats. What marks this version as Virginian rather than English is the tablespoonful of pepper sauce — bottled and homemade pod-pepper vinegars were a Southern table staple by the 1870s, and here one has been folded straight into an inherited English sauce.