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Stewed Onions
Peel and wash twelve onions chopping off the tops and bottoms; cut them in halves, mince them very fine, blanch to give them a sweeter taste and remove the green color, place in a stewpan with a little butter, and cook them. When quite done and all the moisture is evaporated, mix in four tablespoonfuls of bechamel sauce. Sprinkle them over with salt and pepper, rub them through a fine sieve, and keep hot in a saucepan without letting them boil. A small lump of sugar may be added if desired. If a highly-flavored sauce is desired the onions should be put in a stewpan with a little ham, mace and bay leaf and cooked gently for an hour.
This is a purée rather than a dish of onions in sauce — the finished product goes through a sieve and comes out smooth. Read it as the classic soubise, and the odd instructions make sense.
- The hinge: no browningThe onions are blanched and then stewed in butter specifically so they stay pale and sweet. Keep the heat low and the pan covered at first; any colour on the onions and the purée turns beige and tastes of fried onion instead of sweet cream.
- BlanchingDrop the minced onions into boiling salted water briefly — two or three minutes is enough — then drain well. Oscar says blanching gives 'a sweeter taste' and removes 'the green color'; in practice it also strips the raw sulphurous bite. Drain thoroughly, or the purée will not dry out later.
- BéchamelFour tablespoons of a thick white sauce — butter and flour cooked without colour, milk whisked in, simmered until it coats a spoon. Bottled or powdered sauce mixes will not behave the same way here.
- "All the moisture is evaporated"This matters more than the timing. Onions are mostly water; if you add the béchamel before the pan is dry the purée will be soupy and no amount of sieving will fix it.
- SievingA fine sieve and a wooden spoon or pestle is the period method and gives the silkiest result. A food mill or a short burst in a blender does the job faster, though a blender can make it gluey if overworked.
- "Without letting them boil"Once the sauce is in, boiling will split the butter and milk out of the purée. Hold it in a covered pan over the lowest heat, or in a bowl over hot water.
- The lump of sugarTreat it as about a teaspoon; period lumps were broken from a loaf and varied in size, so the amount is a matter of taste. Only worth it if your onions are sharp; modern yellow onions are usually sweet enough after blanching.
- The flavoured versionFor the hour-long variant, use a scrap of raw or cooked ham, a blade of mace and one bay leaf, and pull them all out before sieving. Cook it in a covered pan over very low heat so it stews rather than fries.
- YieldTwelve onions is a generous amount; depending on their size expect something in the region of three to four cups of purée, enough for a large table as a sauce or garnish under lamb, mutton or roast poultry.
What Oscar files under the plain name "Stewed Onions" is essentially purée soubise, the smooth white onion purée of the French repertoire, traditionally credited to the kitchen of the eighteenth-century Prince de Soubise — a name attached to the dish by later cooks rather than by any contemporary document. One of its characteristic features is the blanching and the butter-only cooking, which keeps the onions white; a soubise that has browned is simply a different sauce, though the classic purée is variously bound with béchamel or with rice. Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and never formally a chef, assembled his 1896 book from the working practice of a hotel kitchen that cooked in the French haute cuisine tradition, which is why a purée like this is written down in shorthand, with the béchamel assumed to be standing ready and the sieve assumed to be at hand. In the period it would have gone under mutton chops, roast lamb or a plain roast bird, where its sweetness stood in for a sauce.