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Glazed Onions
Peel the onions and put them into a saucepan with a little warmed butter, add sugar and salt to taste, and pour over a little stock. Place over a moderate fire and cook slowly until they are quite tender and the outside brown, remove and serve on a dish. A little of the liquor thickened with flour may be served as a sauce.
Mashed Onions, Brittany Style Peel and blanch the required quantity of onions, putting them into cold water to cool so that they will retain their color. Drain, put them into a fryingpan with a little butter, sprinkle slightly with salt and sugar, place the pan over a clear fire and fry till they are of a light red color; pour in some Spanish sauce and reduce. Pass the whole through a fine sieve, mix in with it a little warm butter and meat glaze, and serve.
Mashed Onions, Soubise Style Remove the peel from one dozen onions, blanch and drain them, put them into a saucepan with enough chicken broth to cover, and cook slowly until the onions are done, but without allowing them to take color. Pour in one-half pint of bechamel sauce, reduce it, and pass the whole through a fine hair-sieve. Stir in a little butter and chicken glaze, and serve.
Three onion preparations run together: a simple glaze and two purées from the classic French repertoire. The glaze is straightforward; the other two depend on sauces the book assumes you already have on hand.
- Onion size and typeGlazed onions of this kind are usually small whole onions, pearl or boiling onions peeled and left whole, though the recipe itself does not say what size to use. Larger onions will tend to soften through before the outside browns.
- "A moderate fire"On a modern burner this is a medium to medium-low setting; the onions should barely bubble in the butter and stock. Reckon on something like 30 to 40 minutes for small onions, longer for anything bigger.
- The hinge: let the liquid goGlazing works because the stock reduces to a syrup that coats the onions. Add only enough to come partway up them and keep the pan uncovered toward the end. The recipe still expects a little liquor left over to thicken with flour as a sauce, so stop short of a wholly dry pan. Extra stock added late will steam them pale.
- Spanish sauceSauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce: brown roux, brown stock, tomato, mirepoix, simmered and skimmed for hours. A well-reduced brown veal stock or a good demi-glace stands in for it.
- Meat glaze and chicken glazeGlace de viande and glace de volaille — stock reduced until it sets to a sticky syrup. A teaspoon or two is enough to finish a purée. Commercial concentrated stock bases do the same job; add them cautiously, as they are far saltier than a home-reduced glaze.
- Blanching to keep the colorThe Brittany onions go into boiling water briefly and then into cold water, which the recipe says is what preserves their color; the Soubise onions are only blanched and drained, with no cold-water step given. In the Soubise the point is to cook them through with no browning at all — keep the broth at a bare simmer and the finished purée stays ivory.
- Sieve or blenderA fine hair sieve was the standard route to a smooth purée in 1896, along with mortar and tammy cloth. A blender or food processor gets you there faster, though passing the result through a fine strainer afterward still improves the texture of the Soubise.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how large the onions should be, so any yield is approximate: a dozen onions with half a pint of béchamel, reduced, might come to somewhere around three cups of purée.
Soubise is one of the older surviving names in French cookery, traditionally credited to the household of the 18th-century Prince de Soubise and applied to almost anything built on a smooth onion purée bound with rice or béchamel. The Brittany version is its brown counterpart: the onions are deliberately fried to a red-gold before the espagnole goes in, giving a darker, sweeter purée. That both appear here, alongside a plain glaze, reflects what Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection actually was — largely a compilation, assembled by a maître d'hôtel rather than a chef, in which a vegetable was not one dish but a short list of finishes a cook could apply depending on what the plate needed. The assumption throughout is a brigade with espagnole, béchamel and two kinds of glaze already simmering, which is why the instructions are so brief.