recipe contributor
Pierre Lamielle

French Onion Soup

Recipe from Kitchen Scraps: A Humourous Illustrated Cookbook

The French are foul-mouthed. They find enormous pleasure in cussing, eating stinky cheese, and smoking like chimneys. But for some reason they have a globally recognized technique for kissing that involves a lot of tasting of the other person’s mouth. The ultimate contradiction is that the national soup of France is comprised nearly entirely of onions. 

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INGREDIENTS 

PROCEDURE 

Tear up the French bread into 2-inch chunks, and put it in an oven at 200°F. (Don’t worry about preheating the oven.) Dry out the bread while you prepare everything else.

Ciseler the onions.

Heat a large pot over medium heat. When it’s hot, add the oil and the onions. Now you can chill out and, if you have a TV nearby, put on something French with subtitles while you slowly cook the onions . . . because it’s going to take a while—about 30 to 40 minutes.

As the onions cook, they will release moisture. Think of it as forcing the onions to perspire in a sauna and cleaning their smelliness from the inside out. The next thing is the onions will slowly start to turn brown. The sugars deep inside in the onions are being released and caramelizing.

Success of this dish lies in your ability to walk the thin line between golden brown and burnt to merde. You need enough colour so the onions give the soup flavour that will carry it without the help of stock. Just as they are beginning to look perfectly browned and the bottom of the pan is covered with crispy brown flavour clingers, it is time to melt in the butter. Mix it in smoothly, then sprinkle on the flour and stir it quickly to avoid lumps. Cook this for about 30 seconds. Then crank up the heat and toss in the red wine to deglaze the pan. The liquid will help release all the clingy bits on the bottom, which translate into flavour.

When it stops smelling like raw booze, toss in the thyme and water. Bring it to a rapid boil and reduce it by a third, approximately 30 minutes.

While your soup reduces it’s a good time to take the bread out of the oven. Then crank up the broil setting for the final meltdown.

When the soup has reduced, taste it for salt and pepper, and season as needed. It may need lots of both at this point (although seasoning it before this reduces may result in something too salty).

Fill up a deep bowl with chunks of dried-out French bread. Scoop in the onion soup to cover, making sure you gets lots of onion and also plenty of broth for the bread to soak up. Cover the whole thing with a big messy handful of cheese, and blap it onto a tray and into the oven. Keep an eye on it until the cheese gets crusty, bubbly, and golden-brown delicious.

Serve it sizzling with a bottle of French red wine.