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Cream of Browned Onion Soup
4 medium-sized onions 3 tablespoons slightly browned flour 1 cup water 3 tablespoons butter 2 cups milk 1 1/4 teaspoons salt Slice the onions, and put in a buttered pan. Add a little water, cover, and put in the oven, covered. When the onions are tender, remove the cover, and brown. Rub the browned onions through a colander, add the water, and the white sauce, made by adding the hot milk to the butter and slightly browned flour rubbed together until smooth. The white sauce should cook ten minutes in a double boiler before it is added to the onion. Reheat the soup, salt and serve. This makes one quart.
A simple two-part soup: oven-browned onion puree loosened with water, then bound with a béchamel made on browned flour. The browning is the whole point of the dish, and it is the step most easily rushed.
- Browned flourFlour toasted in a dry skillet over medium heat until it smells nutty and turns the color of pale sand, then cooled. It gives the soup its color and a faint roasted flavor, but toasting breaks down some of the starch, so browned flour thickens noticeably less than raw flour. Expect a thinner sauce, or add a fourth tablespoon.
- Oven for the onionsThe original gives neither temperature nor time. A workable modern equivalent: cover and bake at 350F until fully tender, roughly 30 to 40 minutes for four sliced onions in a shallow pan. Then uncover and raise the heat to 400-425F to color the edges, checking every few minutes; scorched onion turns the finished soup bitter.
- "A little water"Unspecified in the original, and it only needs to be enough to keep the covered pan from drying out — two or three tablespoons. The 1 cup of water added later is separate and is measured.
- Rubbing through a colanderA period instruction for a coarse puree. A food mill or a medium sieve does the same work; a blender or immersion blender gives a smoother result than the original ever had, which is a legitimate choice but a different soup.
- The double boilerTen minutes over simmering water cooks out the raw-flour taste without risking a scorched bottom, which a browned roux is especially prone to. A heavy saucepan over low heat with steady whisking accomplishes the same thing in the same time.
- Adding hot milkThe recipe has you add hot milk to the butter-and-flour paste rather than the reverse. Add it in a slow stream while whisking to keep it lump-free.
- Salt and seasoning1 1/4 teaspoons in a quart is within the ordinary modern range; salt at the end, to taste. The original omits pepper entirely — white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg are traditional with onion béchamel.
- YieldOne quart, which is four modest first-course servings or two as a main. It thickens on standing; thin with milk when reheating.
The browned-flour technique belongs to the general French roux tradition, and nineteenth-century American and English cookbooks give directions for browning flour in quantity, toasted in a slow oven, for gravies and brown sauces. Browning the onions in the oven rather than in a skillet, then sieving them, gives a soup quite unlike the modern French onion soup with its cheese-crusted bread: no stock, no crouton, just sweet caramelized onion suspended in a thin white sauce.