No. 543

Soubise Sauce

Sauce Soubise

Cut off the stalks and roots from twelve onions after having divided them in two, throw them into boiling salted water for a few minutes, then drain, refresh, and drain them again. Heat a half a pound of butter in a saucepan, add to it the onions and fry them without coloring until well done, then pour in a pint of veloute (No. 415) and half a pint of stock (No. 422), some peppercorns and grated nutmeg. When the onions are sufficiently cooked, press them forcibly through a tammy (No. 170) and return the sauce to the saucepan on the fire, and add to it six gills of fresh cream; season properly, and incorporate in at the last moment a small piece of fresh butter.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's Soubise is an onion purée bound with velouté and finished with a great deal of cream — a restaurant sauce scaled for a restaurant. Expect to halve or quarter it.

Six gills of creamA gill is half a cup, so six gills is three cups. Added to a pint of veloute and half a pint of stock that is six cups of liquid before the onion puree goes in — a quart and a half or so of finished sauce; a quarter batch is plenty for four servings.
Half a pound of butterTwo full sticks to sweat twelve onions. It is not a misprint — the fat is what keeps the onions pale and gives the purée its texture — but you can drop to four ounces without harming the result.
The blanching step"Refresh" means plunge into cold water to stop the cooking. The brief boil takes the harsh raw edge off the onion before it goes into the butter; do not skip it.
Without coloringThis is the hinge. Keep the pan at a bare sizzle, lid on, and stir often. Any browning turns the sauce beige and sweet-caramel rather than white and delicate, and no amount of cream will hide it.
Velouté and stockVeloute and stock -- No. 415 is Ranhofer's veloute, a roux-thickened white sauce; No. 422 is what he calls stock. A good modern chicken veloute works, or a light chicken stock thickened with a blond roux and simmered until it loses any raw flour taste.
TammyA tammy was a worsted cloth through which sauce was forced with two people twisting the ends. A food mill or blender followed by a fine chinois gets you the same smoothness in a fraction of the time.
ServingSoubise goes with lamb, veal, poached chicken and eggs. Finish it off the heat with the last butter so it does not break, and hold it warm rather than hot.

A Little History

The name is generally traced to Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, a marshal of France under Louis XV whose kitchen — like those of several aristocrats of the period — lent its master's name to a preparation he almost certainly never cooked. In classical French practice "soubise" came to mean simply an onion purée, sometimes bound with rice rather than velouté, and Escoffier would later list both versions. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years and published The Epicurean in 1894, is here transcribing the grand French repertoire wholesale for an American readership, cross-references and all: the numbered pointers to velouté, stock and the tammy show a book built as a working system rather than a collection of stand-alone dishes.