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Onion Sauce
299. Boil the onions gently in milk and water till they are quite soft, then rub them through a colander with a wooden spoon, and boil them up with cream or the yolk of an egg, beaten up with milk or with melted butter.
A bare-bones Victorian formula with no quantities and three alternative finishes. The technique is sound; the wording assumes knowledge a modern cook no longer has.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn nineteenth-century British books melted butter means a thickened sauce of butter, flour and water or milk. Plain liquid butter will not bind the puree. The recipe gives no quantities, so proportions are left to the cook.
- Do not boil the egg yolkTaken literally, boiling a yolk-and-milk mixture curdles it. If you finish with yolk, beat it with a little of the hot sauce, return it off the heat and hold the pan below a simmer until it thickens.
- Cooking liquidThe recipe says only milk and water, without proportions; diluting the milk keeps the onions pale and reduces the risk of scorching. Keep the heat low and the pan part-covered, and reserve the liquid to thin the puree.
- OnionsLarge mild cooking onions, sliced or quartered, take 25-35 minutes to go completely soft. Undercooked onion will not pass the colander and leaves the sauce stringy.
- The colanderA colander and wooden spoon produce a coarse, slightly textured pur"A blender gives a smoother, paler result; a food mill sits between the two and is closest to the original.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives none. Salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg or a little mace would not be out of place in a sauce of this kind.
- Yield and servingServing -- It is a standard accompaniment to roast or boiled mutton, and is also served with boiled rabbit or tripe.
Onion sauce belongs to the plain end of British cookery, where a vegetable puree, thinned with milk and bound with butter or egg, did the work that a stock-based sauce did in French kitchens. Its fixed partner is mutton: the pairing of boiled leg of mutton with onion sauce appears through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookery books. The recipe offers three alternative finishes -- cream, egg yolk, or the flour-thickened butter sauce -- letting the cook choose according to what was at hand.