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Brown Onion Soup
Peel and thinly slice 4 large onions. In a large kettle melt 2 tablespoonfuls of butter, add the onions, cover, draw back and simmer slowly for twenty minutes, then draw forward and cook until pale brown. Sprinkle in 3 large tablespoonfuls of flour. Stir until absorbed and a nice brown color. Slowly add 3 pints of hot milk (or milk and water), stirring until thick and smooth. Add salt and pepper to taste, cover and simmer gently for fifteen minutes longer. This soup is not strained.
A milk-based onion soup from the coal-range era, thickened with a browned roux rather than built on beef stock. Two phrases in the method are about the stove, not the pan.
- "Draw back" and "draw forward"These refer to a wood or coal range, where you moved the pot away from the firebox to slow it and back over the hot plate to speed it up. On a gas or electric burner, read them as low heat for the covered twenty minutes, then medium for the browning.
- The hinge: brown the flour, not the milkColour and flavour come from the onions cooked to pale brown and then the flour cooked in with them until, as the recipe says, it is absorbed and a nice brown colour. Once the milk goes in, the soup should never boil hard; milk thickened with flour catches on the bottom of the pan and the burnt taste cannot be removed.
- Quantities3 pints is 6 cups. Four large onions is roughly 2 lb; sliced thin they will collapse to a fraction of their raw volume. Three "large tablespoonfuls" of flour probably means heaped rather than level, so somewhere around 4 to 5 level tablespoons.
- KettleIn this period a kettle is any deep, heavy cooking pot, not a tea kettle. A 4-quart Dutch oven or heavy saucepan is right.
- Milk and waterThe alternative is not just thrift; half milk and half water gives a lighter soup that tastes more of onion. Whole milk makes it closer to a chowder. Skim milk is likelier to catch on the pan.
- SeasoningSix cups of milk takes a good deal of salt. The recipe adds salt and pepper before the final fifteen-minute simmer, so taste again before serving. A grating of nutmeg or a bay leaf during that simmer suits the flour-and-milk base.
- YieldAbout six cups finished, serving four to six as a first course. It thickens further as it stands; loosen with hot milk when reheating, gently.
This is the frugal branch of onion soup, and it belongs to a different tradition from the beef-broth-and-cheese version generally associated with Paris market halls. Onions were among the cheapest keeping vegetables, milk was for many households a regular delivery, and flour was usually on hand, so a soup built from those three could be put on the table without buying anything at all. The instruction that it is not strained is the tell: a strained soup implies a stock and a discarded solid, whereas here the onions are the substance of the dish. Cheap-cookery collections of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are often said to have leaned on this pattern of a browned roux loosened with milk, which also produced cream of celery, cream of potato and the endless white sauces of the period. Browning the flour was the whole trick: it gave a meatless soup a colour and depth that suggested it had been made with drippings or broth.