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Cream of Onion Soup
6 medium-sized onions sliced. 3 tablespoons butter. 1 quart cold water. 4 tablespoons flour. 1 green pepper chopped. 1 egg yolk. 2 cups scalded milk.
Salt and cayenne.
PROCESS: Cook onion and pepper in two tablespoons butter five minutes, without browning; add water and cook until onions are soft (about forty minutes). Rub through a sieve. Melt remaining butter, add flour and stir to a paste; add gradually scalded milk, stirring constantly. Combine mixtures, add seasonings. Heat to boiling point, remove from range, add yolk of egg slightly beaten. Pass Parmesan cheese and hot, crisp crackers. Two tablespoons cheese may be added to soup when adding egg yolk. Serve very hot.
A classic velouté-style onion soup, thickened with roux and finished with an egg yolk. The method is sound; only a few of the terms and proportions need translating.
- Add the yolk off the heatThis is the hinge. Once the soup has reached boiling point it must come off the burner before the beaten yolk goes in, and it must not return to a boil afterward or the yolk will curdle into threads. Ladle a little hot soup into the yolk first, then stir that back into the pot.
- "Remove from range"The range is the stovetop. Modern gas and induction burners hold far less residual heat than a cast-iron coal range, so on an electric coil you should physically move the pot off the element rather than just turning the dial down.
- Scalded milkHeat the milk until it steams and small bubbles ring the edge, about 180F, not to a rolling boil. Scalding is usually explained as a holdover from raw-milk practice; with pasteurized milk its main practical effect is that the warm milk blends more readily into the roux.
- The sieveRubbing the cooked onions through a sieve gives a smooth puree. A blender or immersion blender does the same work in seconds; pass it through a fine strainer afterward if you want the original texture.
- Cooking time for the onionsForty minutes in water is generous but not wasted here, since the cooking liquid becomes the stock. The first five minutes in butter should be genuinely colorless; any browning shifts the soup toward French onion soup, which is not what is wanted.
- Green pepperAn ordinary green bell pepper, seeds and ribs removed. It reads oddly in a cream soup to modern palates.
- CayenneA pinch, meaning less than an eighth of a teaspoon for the whole quart. Cayenne here is for warmth rather than heat, in the way white pepper is used now.
- YieldRoughly five to six cups of finished soup after evaporation, or four to six servings as a first course. Parmesan and crackers are passed at the table, not stirred in, unless you take the recipe's option of two tablespoons of cheese with the yolk.
Cream soups built on a butter-and-flour roux, thinned with scalded milk and enriched with an egg yolk at the last moment, were the backbone of American middle-class entertaining around 1900, promoted heavily by the cooking-school movement that Fannie Farmer and her Boston contemporaries led. The technique is French in origin, and the reliance on milk rather than veal or chicken stock was above all practical: a household with a milkman but no stockpot could still put a respectable first course on a Sunday table. The green pepper and the passed Parmesan mark the period too, carrying a faint air of sophistication. The instruction to serve it very hot is not filler; a milk-thickened soup skins over and dulls quickly, and it was expected to go from range to table without delay.