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Onion or Sauce Soubise
Peel and cut in slices three large onions. Put them into a saucepan with one ounce of butter, cover, and simmer gently about three-quarters of an hour; the onions must be colored. When tender and soft, add a tablespoonful of flour, mix and press through a colander. Add one gill of stock and one gill of cream, stir continually until it boils. Add a half teaspoonful of salt, a dash of pepper, a grating of nutmeg and it is ready to serve.
A classic French onion purée sauce, thin enough here to double as a soup. It comes together in about an hour, most of it unattended.
- GillOne gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). The recipe therefore takes 1 cup of liquid total, half stock and half cream, which yields a pouring sauce rather than a thick purée.
- "The onions must be colored"This may well be a printer's slip for must not be colored. Sauce soubise is defined by its pale ivory colour and sweet, un-caramelised onion flavour; browning gives you a different sauce altogether. Keep the heat very low and the lid on so the onions sweat in their own moisture.
- Pressing through a colanderA colander will not purée anything by modern standards. Use a food mill, a fine sieve, or a blender or stick blender; if you want the classic satiny texture, pass it through a chinois afterwards.
- The flourA tablespoon of flour stirred into the soft onions needs a minute or two of cooking before liquid goes in, or the sauce tastes pasty. Add the stock and cream gradually and off the boil to avoid lumps.
- Butter quantityOne ounce is 2 tablespoons for three large onions, which is lean. An extra tablespoon helps them sweat without catching, particularly in a thin modern pan.
- StockVeal or light chicken stock is the traditional choice. A dark beef stock will overwhelm the onions and dull the colour.
- Yield and servingAbout 2 cups. As a sauce that dresses four servings of roast or braised lamb or mutton, poached eggs, or veal; thinned with more stock it serves two as soup.
Sauce soubise is generally traced to the household of the Princes de Soubise in eighteenth-century France, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented and the name may simply have been a flattering dedication by a chef in their service. In its fullest classical form the onions are sweated in butter, sometimes bound with rice rather than flour, then sieved and enriched with cream, and it is served above all with lamb and mutton, whose fat the sweet onion cuts. That the same preparation appears under both names, soup and sauce, reflects how fluid the distinction was: the same onion pur"e, loosened or tightened with stock, could appear in either role.