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Onion Sauce with Vinegar
Peel three good-sized onions, mince them fine, place them over the fire with a lump of butter and fry over a brisk fire until brown. Sift a tablespoonful of flour over the onions, pour in two gills of water and season with salt, pepper, mustard and vinegar to taste. Stir the sauce over the fire and boil until quite smooth. It is then ready for use.
A brown onion sauce thickened with a spoon of flour and sharpened with vinegar and mustard — essentially a quick pan gravy for boiled or roast meat. Only the units and the browning need translation.
- Two gillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup (8 fl oz) of water. Three good-sized onions to a cup of liquid gives a thick, almost spoonable sauce; add another half cup if you want it pourable.
- Brown means brownThis is the hinge. The whole flavour comes from taking the minced onions past golden to a genuine deep brown, which takes 15–20 minutes on medium heat rather than the few minutes "brisk fire" suggests. A cast-iron or heavy stainless pan browns more evenly than nonstick.
- "A lump of butter"Read this as 2 to 3 tablespoons. You need enough fat to keep three chopped onions moving without scorching, and enough to absorb the tablespoon of flour.
- Cook the flourSift the flour over the onions and stir it for a minute or two before the water goes in, or the sauce tastes pasty. Add the water in stages, stirring, to avoid lumps.
- Vinegar to tasteStart with a tablespoon of cider or white wine vinegar and a teaspoon of prepared mustard, then adjust off the heat. Malt vinegar suits it if the sauce is going with beef or mutton.
- "Boil until quite smooth"A gentle simmer of 5 to 8 minutes is enough to lose the raw-flour taste and take the edge off the vinegar. Hard boiling only reduces it to paste.
- YieldAbout a cup and a quarter — four servings alongside roast or boiled meat, liver, or sausages.
Onion sauces sharpened with vinegar belong to a long line of sour-sweet meat sauces that runs back through medieval European cookery, where verjuice or vinegar did the work now often given to wine; comparable modern dishes include the German Zwiebelsauce and the English onion gravy served with sausages. Oscar Tschirky's cook book was published in 1896, while he was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, and prints many plain working sauces alongside more elaborate hotel dishes. The mustard-and-vinegar seasoning here suits strong meats: mutton, boiled beef, or organ meats, where a mild velouté would be lost.