No. 2764

Onions Boiled, Hollandaise or Soubise Sauce

Oignons Bouillis, Sauce Hollandaise ou Soubise

Peel medium-sized onions, each one weighing two ounces; boil them in salted water, and when done, drain, wipe carefully, and dress them in clusters or in a row, covering over with Hollandaise sauce (No. 477) or a well-buttered soubise sauce (No. 543).

← No. 2763 Okra or Gumbo, Garnished with Barley Bechame Celery, Onions & Leeks No. 2765 Onions Braised →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer gives no times and assumes you have his sauce numbers to hand. The whole dish turns on not overcooking the onions, which should hold their shape when sauced.

Onion sizeTwo ounces each is what Ranhofer calls medium-sized, roughly golf-ball size — about eight to the pound. Pearl or cipollini onions are too small; look for the smallest yellow boiling onions.
Keeping them wholeTrim the root end but leave the base plate intact, or the layers will slide apart in the water. A shallow cross cut in the root helps the centre cook at the same rate as the outside.
TimingSimmer rather than hard boil, 15-25 minutes depending on size, until a skewer meets no resistance at the centre. Onions boiled hard slump and go watery; the point of the dish is that they stand up in a cluster.
Drain and wipeThe instruction is not fussiness. Pooling cooking water will thin the sauce on the plate and slacken it off the onion.
The cross-referencesNo. 477 is Ranhofer's hollandaise, an egg yolk and butter emulsion; No. 543 is soubise, a puree of stewed onion bound with bechamel or rice and finished with butter. Any standard modern version of either does the job.
Holding hollandaiseMake it last and hold it at no more than about 145F, or over warm not hot water. Above that the yolks tighten and the sauce splits.
YieldFigure three or four onions a head as a vegetable course alongside roast meat — about 1.5 lb of onions for four.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of the kitchen he ran at Delmonico's in New York, and its vegetable chapters are built the way a professional brigade works: a plainly cooked component, then a numbered sauce pulled off the stove to finish it. Soubise is the more interesting of the two options here, since it puts onion on onion — a thick puree of stewed onions bound with bechamel, or in older French practice with rice, and generally traced to the household of the Prince de Soubise, an eighteenth-century French marshal whose name attached to the sauce in the way court and noble names often did. Hollandaise, despite the name, is a French sauce by the time Ranhofer is writing, and its pairing with a plain boiled vegetable was standard restaurant practice: asparagus, artichokes, salsify and onions all arrived under it.