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Puree Soubise
Finely slice six sound, peeled onions, place in a large saucepan with one and a half ounces butter and cook for fifteen minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile; add two and a half ounces flour and stir well while heating for two minutes. Pour in one and a half quarts white broth and a pint and a half milk; add two branches each parsley and celery, season with one and a half teaspoons salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg; mix with a wooden spoon until it comes to a boil, then let simmer for forty minutes. Strain through a sieve into a basin, then through a cheesecloth into a soup tureen, add half ounce good butter, lightly mix, and serve.
A straightforward onion velouté that lives or dies on the first fifteen minutes. Everything else is timing and straining.
- Sweat, do not brownThe onions must stay pale through the initial fifteen minutes — any colour and the finished purée goes from ivory to muddy beige with a caramel edge. Keep the heat low, cover the pan if it helps, and stir as directed.
- Quantities in cups1½ oz butter is 3 tablespoons; 2½ oz flour is a scant 2/3 cup. One and a half quarts is 6 cups, a pint and a half is 3 cups. Six onions works out to roughly 2 lb trimmed.
- White brothA pale unsalted stock, veal or chicken, made without browning the bones. Low-sodium chicken stock is the practical substitute; if you use anything salted, hold back the 1½ teaspoons salt until the end.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon. Two of cayenne is about ½ teaspoon, which is assertive in a cream soup — start with half and adjust after straining.
- Branches of parsley and celeryTwo sprigs of parsley and two celery stalks with leaves, pulled out with the sieve. They are aromatics, not body.
- The forty-minute simmerA flour-thickened soup can catch on the bottom. Use a heavy pan, keep it at a bare tremble, and scrape the base periodically with the wooden spoon.
- Double strainingFor a purée the sieve pass is best done with pressure, working the onion pulp through; the cheesecloth pass afterward is for texture. Strain the sieve too gently and you are left with little more than a thin onion-flavoured béchamel.
- Finishing butterThe half ounce (1 tablespoon) goes in off the heat and is stirred, not boiled — it is there for gloss and should not be allowed to split.
- YieldAbout 9 cups of liquid go into the pan; expect somewhat less after the simmer, serving eight to ten as a first course.
Anything called Soubise in French cooking means onions, and the name is traditionally traced to Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, an 18th-century marshal of France whose kitchen — more likely his cooks than the marshal himself — gave its name to the thick onion purée used as a sauce and a garnish. Escoffier codified sauce Soubise as onions cooked pale in butter, bound with rice or béchamel and sieved; this soup is the same idea diluted with stock and milk, which is exactly how a great many classical sauces earned a second life on the soup list.