Home › The Principles of Cookery › Onion Soup
Onion Soup
Peel half a dozen Spanish onions, and mince them very finely. Fry them in a little fresh butter until they are tender without being browned. Pour over them about three pints of nicely-seasoned stock, add a little cayenne, salt, and pepper, and simmer gently for twenty minutes. Press the soup through a hair-sieve, and return it to the saucepan. Grate the crumb of a stale loaf into half a pint of boiling milk or cream, stir this into the soup, and serve very hot. Time, eight or ten minutes to fry the onions. Probable cost, onions, 1 1/2d. each. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A white onion soup thickened with breadcrumbs rather than flour "panade" style, and quite different from the brown, cheese-topped soup most people now expect. The whole character of it depends on keeping the onions pale.
- Do not let the onions colourThe soup is meant to be ivory-white and sweet, not caramelised. Cook the minced onions in butter over low heat, covered, stirring often; twenty to thirty minutes gives more tenderness than the ten the recipe allows, and browning at any point coarsens the flavour.
- Spanish onionsThese are the large, mild, pale-skinned onions still sold under that name. Six of them is a great deal — roughly 3 to 4 lb — which suits three pints of stock. Ordinary yellow onions work but are sharper, so taste before seasoning.
- Three pintsImperial measure: 60 fl oz, about 7 1/4 US cups. Half a pint of milk or cream is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 cups.
- Stock"Nicely-seasoned stock" is left unspecified. A light veal or chicken stock suits a white soup better than beef, which will darken it and sit awkwardly with the milk. A good low-salt chicken stock is a reasonable modern equivalent.
- The hair-sieveHorsehair sieves were standard for fine sieving; one reason often given is that metal could taint acidic food. A blender followed by a fine strainer does the job faster and gives a smoother result; if you want texture, sieve half and leave the rest.
- Grated breadcrumbsThe thickener is the dry interior crumb of a stale loaf, grated fine; the recipe gives no weight, so add it gradually until the soup is as thick as you want. Modern soft sandwich bread turns to paste; use a plain white sourdough or country loaf, dried out, and let it swell in the hot milk before it goes into the soup.
- After the milk goes inKeep it below a simmer. Boiling milk or cream into a thickened onion purée risks catching on the base and splitting, and the recipe's instruction to serve "very hot" should be read as hot, not boiling.
- YieldSix to eight as a first course, as stated. The seasonings given are cayenne, salt and pepper; a scrape of nutmeg would not be out of period if you want it.
Onion soups thickened with bread are far older than the gratinéed version associated with Les Halles in Paris; the bread-and-onion combination was cheap food across France and England long before cheese and toast were floated on top. The price note — three-halfpence an onion — suggests the recipe was pitched at a household counting costs, where a soup for eight could be built from onions, stock and a stale loaf. The technique here belongs to a family of English "white" soups (white soup, palestine soup, artichoke soup) thickened with breadcrumbs, ground almonds or rice rather than a roux, a style largely displaced in the twentieth century by flour-based velouté and later by plain cream.