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Soubise Garnish
This is made of onions prepared with broth and bechamel sauce as follows: Cut up three onions, put them in a saucepan with one ounce of butter, half a breakfast cupful of white broth, a tablespoonful of salt and one level saltspoonful of white pepper, cover the saucepan and cook for twenty minutes, stirring frequently. Add two breakfast cupfuls of bechamel sauce and boil for five minutes longer. Strain through a cloth, pour it back into the saucepan, add more seasoning if required, also a little grated nutmeg and a little warm milk should it be too thick; warm up again and use as required. St. Nazaire Garnish.
This garnish usually served with fish is made up of fine herbs cooked as follows: Put three tablespoonfuls of court bouillon into a saucepan with a wineglassful of white wine, a tablespoonful of cooked fine herbs, a breakfast cupful of allemande sauce, salt and pepper to taste, and warm it all up. Pour the sauce over the fish it is to be served with and garnish with eight hot clams.
Two classical garnitures in one entry: an onion purée bound with béchamel, and a herb-and-wine sauce for fish. Both assume a kitchen with mother sauces already standing on the stove.
- The salt is a professional-scale errorA tablespoon of salt into three onions and half a cup of broth would be inedible at home. Start with half a teaspoon, and remember that the two cups of béchamel added later are also seasoned.
- Breakfast cupfulCommonly reckoned at about 8 fl oz, though breakfast cups were not standardised and could run larger. On that basis the soubise is 3 onions, 1 oz butter, 1/2 cup white stock, and 2 cups bechamel; the St. Nazaire is 1 cup allemande with 3 tablespoons court bouillon and a wineglassful of white wine, roughly 2 fl oz.
- Sweat, do not brownThis is the hinge of the soubise. Covered, over low heat, with frequent stirring, the onions should stay pale and collapse into sweetness; any colour turns the finished purée grey-beige and gives it a fried-onion edge that has no place under lamb or veal.
- White brothUnsalted white stock — veal or chicken simmered without browning the bones. A light chicken stock is the practical substitute; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced.
- Straining through a clothThe intent is a smooth purée, not a clear liquid. A blender or food mill followed by a fine sieve gets there faster; a chinois and ladle will do it the original way.
- Allemande sauceVelouté finished with egg yolk, cream and lemon. It splits and curdles if boiled, so the instruction to merely "warm it all up" is deliberate. Many later books rename this sauce parisienne, a change generally traced to anti-German feeling during the First World War.
- Court bouillonThe seasoned water the fish was poached in — water with wine or vinegar, onion, carrot, bay and peppercorns. Three tablespoons is a flavouring, not a base.
- Fine herbsChopped parsley, chervil, tarragon and chives, here already cooked so they lose their raw bite. Fresh chopped herbs stirred in at the end will taste sharper and greener than intended.
- The eight clamsThey must be cooked and opened separately — steamed until they gape, then kept warm — and set on the plate at the last moment. Nothing in this sauce is hot enough or long enough to cook a clam.
- YieldThe soubise makes about 2 cups, enough to garnish six to eight plates. The St. Nazaire sauce dresses two to four portions of fish.
Soubise is named for Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, an eighteenth-century marshal of France whose kitchen is traditionally credited with the onion purée that carries his name, though the attribution is culinary lore rather than documented fact. By Oscar Tschirky's day the name had hardened into a code word in the professional repertoire: soubise meant onions cooked white, sieved, and bound — usually with béchamel, sometimes with rice — and served with lamb, veal or eggs. That is why this entry reads less like a recipe than like a note to a cook who already knows the system: it presumes béchamel, velouté, allemande and court bouillon are all standing ready, and it spends its words only on the proportions. The St. Nazaire garnish tacked onto the end takes its name from the Breton port at the mouth of the Loire, and shows the same shorthand at work, a fish sauce identified by a place name.