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Onion Sauce for Boiled Fowl
Peel and slice one pint of onions; put them in a stewpan over the fire with enough milk to cover and stew until tender; then beat them to a pulp with a fork; add a seasoning of salt and white pepper, sufficient milk to form a sauce of the consistency of cream, and a tablespoonful of butter.
A plain white onion sauce of the sort that dressed boiled poultry and mutton in hotel kitchens. There is no flour in it, so the body comes entirely from the pulped onion — which is the point to keep in mind.
- A pint of onionsOnions here are measured by volume after slicing, not by weight. A pint of sliced onion is roughly 8 to 12 oz depending how thickly it is cut, or two to three medium yellow onions.
- StewpanA stewpan is a straight-sided saucepan with a lid, not a stew pot. Use any heavy 2-quart saucepan; a thin pan will scorch the milk before the onions soften.
- Keep the milk below a boilThis is the hinge. Milk with nothing to stabilise it will catch on the bottom and taste burnt, and the sauce takes the flavour of the scorch. Hold it at a bare simmer, stir often, and give the onions 20 to 30 minutes to go completely soft.
- Beat them to a pulpA fork gives a rustic, slightly stringy sauce, which is what the recipe calls for. A stick blender or food mill gives a smoother version; either is faithful to the intent.
- No thickenerBecause there is no roux, the finished sauce is loose. Add the extra milk cautiously — it is easier to slacken than to recover body.
- White pepperSpecified so no black flecks show in a white sauce. It is a genuinely different flavour from black pepper, more musty and less sharp, and worth using as written.
- Butter last, off the heatThe tablespoon of butter is for gloss and to round the onion. Stir it in at the end rather than boiling it in, or it will separate out as a film.
- YieldRoughly two cups, enough for a four- to five-pound boiled fowl serving four to six. Serve hot.
Onion sauce belongs to the long English tradition of boiled meat with a milk-based sauce — the same family as bread sauce for roast fowl and the onion sauce that has accompanied boiled mutton since at least the eighteenth century. Boiling was the ordinary treatment for an older, tougher hen, which produced tender meat but pale, bland skin, so a sauce did the work that browning would otherwise have done. That Oscar Tschirky included so unadorned a version in a book otherwise full of Waldorf grandeur is a reminder that a large hotel kitchen at the turn of the century still cooked a great deal of plainly boiled food. The absence of flour may point to a simpler, older style, though flour-thickened onion sauces were also long established; the flour-thickened white onion sauce and the French soubise built on béchamel are the versions more often met in later cookbooks.