Home › Fish And Meat Sauces › Soubise Sauce
Soubise Sauce
2 cups sliced onions 1 cup Velouté Sauce ½ cup cream or milk Salt and pepper Cover onions with boiling water, cook five minutes, drain, again cover with boiling water, and cook until soft; drain, and rub through a sieve. Add to sauce with cream. Season with salt and pepper. Serve with mutton, pork chops, or " hard-boiled" eggs.
A classic onion purée sauce built on velouté, from the era when white sauces were a category of their own. The whole point is sweetness without sulfur, which is what the double blanching achieves.
- Do not skip the second waterBoiling the onions five minutes, draining, then covering with fresh boiling water is what strips the harsh sulfurous edge. Cooking them once in a single pot of water gives a noticeably sharper sauce.
- VeloutéThe base assumed here is a white roux (butter and flour cooked together without coloring) whisked with white stock — veal, chicken, or fish depending on what the sauce will accompany. The book gives the velouté recipe separately; follow its proportions rather than guessing.
- The cream measure"1½ cup" is likely a typesetting slip for 1½ cups, but even so it is a great deal of liquid for 1 cup of velouté. Add it gradually and stop when the sauce coats a spoon; you may want only half.
- Sieve or blenderRubbing soft onion through a sieve was the usual route to smoothness when this was written. A blender or food processor does it in seconds, though pushing the purée through a fine sieve afterward still improves the texture.
- Onion typeUse yellow or Spanish onions. Two cups sliced is roughly two medium onions.
- Reduce at the endAfter the cream goes in, let the sauce simmer gently to the thickness you want. Onion purée holds water, and an unreduced soubise runs off the plate.
- YieldAbout 2½ cups, enough for six servings alongside chops or eggs.
- ServingMutton is hard to find; lamb chops or a shoulder roast take the sauce equally well, as do pork chops and halved hard-boiled eggs, both named in the recipe.
Soubise is generally traced to Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, an eighteenth-century French marshal whose kitchen is traditionally credited with the onion purée that carries his name — an attribution repeated in nineteenth-century cookery writing more often than it is documented. What is certain is that by the time Fannie Farmer compiled the Boston Cooking School Cook Book, soubise had settled into the standard Anglo-American repertoire of derivative sauces: take a mother sauce, in this case velouté, add one defining element, and give the result a French name. Farmer's sauce chapter is organized on exactly that logic, teaching a small number of bases and then a run of variations, which was the pedagogical heart of the Boston Cooking School method. The pairing with hard-boiled eggs, which reads oddly now, reflects a period when eggs in sauce were a respectable main course for luncheon or a meatless day.