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Poached Eggs, Soubise
Peel, cut in half and finely slice two medium-sized white onions, place in a saucepan with a tablespoon melted butter and slowly fry for seven minutes, mixing well meanwhile. Add a level tablespoon flour, stir briskly, pour in half pint hot milk and briskly mix. Season with half teaspoon salt, one saltspoon cayenne pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg; lightly mix, then let gently simmer for ten minutes. Prepare twelve poached eggs on toast. Strain the sauce through a strainer over the eggs and serve.
A classic French onion sauce over poached eggs, from a book that assumes you already know how to poach. The whole dish turns on keeping the onions pale.
- Keep the onions white"Slowly fry for seven minutes" means sweating in butter over low heat until translucent and soft, with no colour at all. Any browning turns the sauce beige and gives it a sweet, caramelised flavour that is not what soubise means.
- MeasuresA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon. Half a pint of milk is one cup (US measure; if you are reading an imperial edition, 10 fl oz). The tablespoon of butter and tablespoon of flour make a standard small roux for that quantity of milk.
- CayenneA quarter teaspoon of cayenne in one cup of sauce is assertive by modern standards. Start with an eighth and adjust; the nutmeg should stay in the background.
- StrainingThe instruction to strain means the onions are discarded and only their flavour remains, giving a light onion-flavoured bechamel rather than a puree. Alternatively you can press the onions through the sieve or blend them in for a thicker, sweeter sauce; both are defensible, and the original is the lighter of the two.
- ConsistencyTen minutes of gentle simmering both cooks out the raw flour and reduces the sauce. If it thickens past coating consistency before the eggs are ready, loosen it with a little more hot milk rather than letting it sit and skin over.
- The eggsPoach in barely trembling water with a splash of vinegar, three to four minutes for a set white and liquid yolk. Do them last, or hold them in warm water, and drain them well on a towel before they go on the toast so the sauce is not watered down.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six at two apiece. The cup of sauce is enough to nap them, not to pool; double it if you like the plate flooded.
Soubise is one of the old French mother-sauce derivatives, an onion purée or onion-flavoured béchamel, and the name is traditionally traced to Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, the eighteenth-century marshal of France whose kitchen is generally credited with it — as with most such attributions, the story is culinary lore rather than documented fact. By the time Alexander Filippini compiled The International Cook Book in the early 1900s, soubise had become standard restaurant vocabulary in America: a cook who saw the word on a menu knew onions were involved, just as "florentine" meant spinach. Its appearance here over poached eggs reflects the enormous egg repertoire of hotel and club cookery of the period, where a few dozen basic sauces were rotated across eggs, fish and cutlets to produce a card of apparently endless dishes.