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Whites of Eggs in Soubise Sauce
Poach or hard-boil some whites of eggs, and pour over them this sauce, previously made: — Work together one ounce of butter and two ounces of flour with a wooden spoon; put into a saucepan with one-half chopped onion, one-half carrot, a bit of celery, a sprig of parsley, one-half bay leaf, a sprig of thyme, pepper, salt and just a suspicion of nutmeg; moisten with one-half pint of milk. Stir over the fire, let boil, and strain in a basin; when wanted, stir in cream in proportion of one-half the whole quantity, and place the cooked whites in a dish, and pour this sauce over them.
A thrifty way to use up leftover whites, dressed in a strained onion-scented white sauce. The proportions read oddly to a modern eye, so a few notes before you start.
- The flour is the hingeTwo ounces of flour to one of butter and a cup of milk gives a paste, not a sauce; the roux will be dry and will want careful work to avoid lumps. The cream stirred in at the end is what brings it back to pouring consistency, so do not skip it or reduce it.
- MeasurementsOne ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; the two ounces of flour is a weight, which works out to roughly a scant half cup measured by volume. Half a pint of milk is one cup if the book is using American measure, 10 fluid ounces if imperial.
- "Stir in cream in proportion of one-half the whole quantity"Ambiguous. Read most naturally it means cream equal to half the strained sauce, roughly half a cup for the batch above, though it may mean cream making up half the finished total. Add it off the heat and warm through without boiling.
- Cook the roux before the milk goes inThe instruction to "work together" butter and flour and put them straight in the pan with the vegetables skips the usual cooking of the roux; the sauce is boiled later, but a minute or two over low heat first helps it not taste of paste.
- Strain properlyEverything aromatic — onion, carrot, celery, parsley, bay, thyme — is discarded, so press the solids against the sieve to get what you can from them; the cooking is brief.
- The egg whitesHard-boiled whites are simply the whites from eggs boiled whole, the yolks kept for another use. If you poach whites on their own, slide them into barely trembling salted water; they set in about two minutes and turn rubbery if left longer.
- Nutmeg"A suspicion" means a few scrapes of a whole nutmeg. Pre-ground nutmeg is flatter and staler than freshly grated; use a very light hand either way.
- Yield and servingThe quantity of sauce suits the whites of several eggs, a light supper dish for two or three. Toast, rice or plain boiled potatoes underneath would suit it; the recipe has the sauce poured over the whites in the dish.
Soubise is one of the old French béchamel derivatives, a white sauce carrying the sweetness of onion, and the name is generally traced to the eighteenth-century Prince de Soubise, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. Classic versions purée the onion into the sauce; here it is used as an aromatic and strained out, which makes this closer to a lightly perfumed cream sauce than to the true soubise of the professional kitchen. Recipes for custards, cakes and mayonnaise consumed yolks freely, and a cook could be left with whites to use up — which is the obvious purpose this dish serves.