Home › Meats › Soubise Sauce (Melt two tablespoons butter)
Soubise Sauce (Melt two tablespoons butter)
Melt two tablespoons butter; add two tablespoons flour, one half teaspoon salt, three small onions which have been boiled and pressed through a sieve, a dash of cayenne, and sufficient cream to make of consistency to spread.
A thick onion sauce built on a white roux, written for a cook who already knows how far to take the flour. The instruction that governs everything is "consistency to spread" — this is not a pouring sauce but a paste stiff enough to coat a cutlet and hold its shape.
- Cook the roux, don't colour itTwo tablespoons butter to two tablespoons flour is a standard white roux. Let it bubble two or three minutes over low heat to cook out the raw flour taste, but keep it pale; any browning ruins the ivory colour that defines this sauce.
- The onionsThree small onions means roughly 6 to 8 oz trimmed. Boil them until completely soft — 20 to 30 minutes — then drain well before sieving, or the water they carry will thin the sauce past spreading consistency. A food mill or a quick blitz in a processor replaces the sieve; a blender gives a smoother purée than the original could have managed.
- Cream, by eyeNo quantity is given because the amount depends on how wet your onion purée is. Start with about 1/4 cup and add a spoonful at a time. Stop while the sauce still mounds on the spoon.
- What "to spread" is forAt this thickness the sauce is meant to be masked over cooked meat — lamb cutlets, veal, sweetbreads — and could be crumbed and browned, or used cold as a coating. Thinned with more cream and a little stock it serves as a pouring sauce for mutton or roast lamb.
- Cayenne and saltA dash of cayenne is a pinch — an eighth of a teaspoon or less; it is meant to sharpen the sweetness of the onion, not to register as heat. The recipe salts with the roux, so taste again once the cream is in — boiled onions take more salt than you expect.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a quarter to a cup and a half, depending on how much cream the purée takes.
- Keeping it smoothAdd the cream off the heat or over very low heat and stir constantly. Once the onion purée is in, the sauce catches easily on the bottom of the pan and scorched onion is unmistakable.
Soubise is generally traced to Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, an eighteenth-century French marshal whose kitchen is credited by tradition with the onion purée that carries his name — like most such attributions in classical cookery, it is repeated more often than it is documented. By the nineteenth century the sauce had settled into two forms: a white sauce enriched with sieved onion, and a richer version bound with rice cooked in the onions. Its appearance in an American household book of the early twentieth century shows how thoroughly the French sauce repertoire had been absorbed into ordinary middle-class cooking; Lowney's, published by a Boston chocolate manufacturer, is remembered for its confectionery but ran a full general kitchen course alongside it, and among its offerings was a spreadable soubise for masking cutlets.