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Soubise Sauce (To Hollandaise Sauce add one)
To Hollandaise Sauce, add one cup finely chopped cooked and seasoned onion.
A one-line derivative sauce of the kind classical kitchens produced by the dozen: the parent sauce is assumed, and only the addition is written down. Everything that can go wrong here happens where the onion meets the emulsion.
- The hinge: get the onion dryA cup of chopped onion carries a great deal of water, and water is what splits a butter-and-yolk emulsion. Cook the onion soft in butter without colour, then press or blot it well, or reduce it until the pan is dry, before it goes anywhere near the sauce.
- "Cooked and seasoned"That means stewed gently in butter until translucent and sweet — no browning, since colour and caramel flavour both read as wrong in a soubise — and salted, with white pepper if you want it invisible. Ten to fifteen minutes over low heat is enough for a cup.
- Texture choice"Finely chopped" gives a sauce with visible flecks. If you want the smooth ivory soubise of restaurant practice, purée the softened onion and sieve it, then fold it in.
- Fold, do not whisk hardAdd the onion off the heat, in two or three additions, stirring gently. Vigorous beating into a warm emulsion at this stage is the usual cause of a broken sauce.
- Holding temperatureHollandaise and its offspring are usually held warm, in the region of 140-150F. Much hotter and the yolk begins to set and curdle; much below and the butter congeals. A bowl over warm — not simmering — water, and not for long, is the practical limit, and the onion makes it a poorer keeper still, so make it close to service.
- Proportion and yieldA cup of onion is a heavy addition: against a hollandaise of the usual sort (the book's own proportions are not repeated here) it increases the volume substantially and will dominate the flavour. Half that quantity gives a sauce still recognisable as hollandaise.
- What to serve it withThe book gives no direction. Soubise belongs with lamb and mutton, veal, poached eggs, and boiled vegetables such as asparagus, cauliflower or new potatoes.
Soubise is the standard classical name for an onion sauce or onion purée, generally traced to the household of the eighteenth-century French marshal Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise — a traditional attribution rather than a documented invention, and one of a family of sauces named for aristocratic patrons alongside Béchamel and Mornay. In the French repertoire soubise is more often built on béchamel, with the onion purée bound by cream; grafting it onto hollandaise, as here, is the American cookbook habit of treating a small set of mother sauces as a kit from which variations are assembled by addition. Lowney's Cook Book, produced by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company in the early 1900s, is best remembered for its chocolate work, but it carries a full sauce chapter organised exactly this way: one worked-out parent recipe followed by a page of terse one-line children.