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Onion Sauce
Peel the required number of onions, and put them into a saucepan of cold water. When the water boils pour it off, and add more boiling water so as to take the strength out of the onions. Repeat this two or three times more, and the onions will be quite mild. Chop them up, but not too small, and mix them with melted butter, or pound the onions to a pulp, mix them with a little cream sauce, and they are ready to use. Onion sauce is used generally for roasted or boiled shoulder of mutton, tripe, ducks or rabbits.
A method rather than a formula: Oscar gives no quantities, so the cook decides. The whole point is the repeated change of boiling water, which strips the harsh sulphur compounds out of the onions before they ever meet butter or cream.
- The hinge: change the water hotStart the onions in cold water, bring to a boil, drain, then cover again with boiling water each time. Adding cold water for the second and third rounds slows the cooking and leaves the onions firm in the middle while you are still waiting for mildness. Counting the first boil, the text asks for three or four changes in all.
- Quantities to start fromFor four servings, figure two large yellow onions (about 1 lb before peeling) reduced with 2-3 tablespoons melted butter, or the same weight pounded and loosened with about 3/4 cup cream sauce. That gives roughly 1 1/2 cups of sauce.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not a puddleIn kitchens of this period melted or drawn butter usually meant a butter sauce, butter worked with a little flour and water or cooking liquid until it held together, rather than clarified butter. Keep it below a simmer and it will coat the onions instead of separating.
- "Cream sauce" means béchamel"Cream sauce" most likely means a white sauce of the bechamel type -- a white roux cooked without colour, then milk or thin cream, seasoned to taste. Make it on the thick side, since the onions will carry some water with them.
- Season at the endThe repeated draining takes out salt-carrying flavour along with the sharpness, so the finished sauce almost always needs more salt than expected. White pepper keeps the sauce clean-looking; a few drops of lemon lifts it for rabbit or duck.
- Texture, and the food processorChopped "but not too small" is the version for mutton and tripe, where you want to feel the onion. If you want the smooth version, pass the drained onions through a sieve or use short pulses; a food processor run continuously turns boiled onion into a thin, watery slurry that will not thicken.
- Onion choiceAn ordinary yellow storage onion is the likely intent, though the recipe does not specify. Sweet onions such as Vidalia have little "strength" to draw out and go flat and sugary under three changes of water.
- ServingOscar's pairings still hold, and the sauce is at least as good with roast lamb shoulder as with mutton. Serve it hot from the pan; reheated, the buttered version separates and needs to be whisked back together off the heat.
Onion sauce belongs to the plain end of the English repertoire that American hotel kitchens inherited wholesale, and its usual partner was mutton, a meat that has largely disappeared from the American table since Oscar Tschirky compiled this book at the Waldorf around the turn of the twentieth century. The technique of blanching onions through several changes of boiling water is old and pre-dates any understanding of why it works: heat and water carry off the volatile sulphur compounds released when an onion is cut, which is why the third boiling tastes so much gentler than the first. The alternate finishes Oscar offers, drawn butter or cream sauce, might be read as something like the difference between the English and French treatments of the same vegetable, and one is tempted to see in his setting them side by side without comment a kitchen that had to send out both a boiled shoulder of mutton and a sauced duck on the same evening. Tripe and rabbit in the same list of pairings are a reminder of how much wider the everyday meat counter was in 1896 than it is now.