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Onion Sauce
To one cup White Sauce add one half cup cream and one cup boiled onions, finely chopped. Simmer twenty minutes. 2 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon mustard teaspoon salt
A short entry that assumes you already know the white sauce it sits beside; the loose list of butter, flour and seasoning at the end is the base, not a second set of additions.
- Reading the ingredient listThe trailing "2 tablespoons butter, 4 tablespoons flour, 1 teaspoon mustard, teaspoon salt" is most likely the formula for the cup of white sauce, presumably made up with about a cup of milk, though the recipe names no liquid. Four tablespoons of flour to a cup of liquid would give a very thick binding sauce, which would suit the half cup of cream and cup of wet onions going in after.
- A missing fractionThe salt is printed as "teaspoon salt", apparently with a fraction lost in setting; a half or a quarter teaspoon would both be ordinary. Season at the end rather than guessing at the start.
- Dry mustard, not prepared"Mustard" in an American sauce formula of this date usually means dry mustard powder, which can be whisked into the roux with the flour. A teaspoon is assertive and lifts the sauce beyond the taste of thickened milk.
- Boiled onionsTwo medium yellow onions, simmered in salted water or milk until soft and then drained well and chopped, give roughly the cup called for. Drain them properly or the sauce thins as it stands.
- The twenty minutesThat long simmer is there to cook out the raw flour taste and let the onion flavour move into the sauce. Keep it at a bare tremble over low heat and stir often; a full boil on a modern burner will catch the flour on the bottom of the pan and scorch.
- Consistency at the endAfter twenty minutes it will have tightened considerably. Loosen with milk or stock to a pouring consistency before serving.
- Yield and servingAbout two cups, enough for four to six servings. It is a sauce for boiled or roast mutton and lamb, for tripe, for boiled fowl, and for plain steamed vegetables.
Onion sauce is the English kitchen's plainest answer to boiled mutton, and it appears in many general cookbooks of this period, usually within a page or two of the white sauce it depends on. The refined French version, soubise, purees the onions into a bechamel and is traditionally said to be named for the eighteenth-century Prince de Soubise; the American household version keeps the onions chopped. Its presence in Lowney's Cook Book is a reminder that the book, published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, was a full general cookery manual and not simply a promotional pamphlet for the firm's chocolate — the chocolate chapters sit alongside a complete run of everyday sauces, roasts and vegetables.