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French Onion Soup
6 Medium-sized Onions 3 Tablespoonfuls Snowdrift 1 Quart Well-seasoned Soup Stock 6 Squares of Toast American Cheese Melt the Snowdrift in a frying-pan, add the onions, sliced, and fry very gently until they are tender. Then add the soupstock, with salt and pepper, if necessary, and simmer for five minutes. In the meantime, put a slice of American cheese on each piece of toast and let stand in the oven until the cheese melts. Put a piece of this cheese toast in each soup plate, pour over the soup, and serve.
A short-cut version of onion soup built around a branded shortening, from a cookbook published to sell that shortening. The method works, but the onion stage wants far longer than the recipe implies.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company. Substitute 3 tablespoons of butter, or half butter and half neutral oil; the butter browns the onions better than shortening does.
- Fry very gently until tenderThis is the hinge. Six sliced onions need 30 to 45 minutes over low heat to collapse and turn genuinely brown and sweet. Onions merely softened to translucency give a thin, sharp soup, and the five-minute simmer that follows will not fix it.
- American cheeseAt the date of this book this meant a firm domestic cheddar cut in slices, not processed cheese slices. Use a sharp cheddar, or Gruyere if you want the soup closer to what a modern reader expects.
- Well-seasoned soup stockA quart, and the soup depends entirely on it. Beef stock is traditional; the instruction to add salt and pepper "if necessary" assumes a homemade stock already seasoned, so taste before adding anything to a commercial low-sodium broth.
- Oven for the toastNo temperature is given. A 400F oven, or a broiler for a minute or two, melts the cheese on the toast without drying it out.
- Squares of toastCut from a firm white loaf, sliced thick and toasted until dry through, or it will disintegrate the moment the soup hits it. Stale bread holds up better than fresh.
- YieldSix squares of toast and a quart of stock: six small first-course servings, or four as a light supper.
This is a promotional recipe. A New Snowdrift Cook Book was issued by the makers of Snowdrift, a vegetable shortening sold in American kitchens in the era of Crisco, which arrived in 1911, and every recipe in it exists to show the product doing a job formerly done by butter or lard. French onion soup was a useful demonstration piece: it is French enough to carry prestige, cheap enough for a household cook, and its first step is nothing but fat and onions. The soup itself is far older than the book, generally traced to the onion soups of French home cooking, where long-cooked onions and stale bread turned pantry staples into a dish; the grantinéed cheese crust familiar from Paris restaurants is a later refinement. Here the crust is simplified to a slice of cheddar melted on toast in the oven.