Onion Soup, Cheap
INGREDIENTS for soup for 8 persons.-8 middlingsized onions, 3 oz. of butter, a tablespoonful of rice-flour, salt and pepper to taste, 1 teaspoonful of powdered sugar, thickening of butter and flour, 2 quarts of water. AVERAGE COST, 8d.
Cut the onions small, put them into the stewpan with the butter and fry them well; mix the rice-flour smoothly with the water, add the onions, seasoning and sugar, and simmer till tender. Thicken with butter and flour, and serve.
TIME.-2 hours.
SEASONABLE in winter.
A frugal water-based onion soup with no stock at all — its whole character depends on how far you take the onions in the butter. Read the frying step as the hinge of the dish.
- Fry the onions properlyEverything the soup will taste of comes from browning the onions in the butter; water contributes nothing. Give them 25-40 minutes over moderate heat until deep gold and jammy, not the few minutes "fry them well" might suggest.
- Rice-flourGround rice or rice flour; nineteenth-century books use the terms loosely, and modern rice flour (finer than ground rice) does the same job as a thickener that will not go stringy. A tablespoon in 2 quarts of liquid is a very light body; cornflour or a little more rice flour gives the same effect if you want it thicker.
- Thickening of butter and flourAn unmeasured beurre manié — equal weights of soft butter and plain flour kneaded together, then whisked into the simmering soup in small lumps. Around 1 oz of each is right for this quantity; simmer two or three minutes afterwards to cook out the raw flour.
- The two hoursOnions cut small are tender well before two hours. The long simmer probably also serves to reduce and concentrate a stockless liquid; an hour may be plenty, and taste before you commit to more.
- SeasoningWith no stock, salt does the work of the missing meat. Season in stages and finish generously. The teaspoon of sugar is there to push the onions' sweetness forward, not to make the soup sweet.
- QuantitiesThe book gives no weight for "middling-sized" onions; reckon very roughly 4 oz each, so somewhere around 2 lb in all. Two imperial quarts is about 2.3 litres, and the recipe's eight servings are modest first-course bowls.
- Cost noteThe 8d given is the total for the pot, not per head — the book's costings are a useful record of Victorian household economy stated in figures.
Mrs Beeton gives more than one onion soup, and the qualifier "cheap" marks this one out: no stock, no milk, no eggs, nothing but onions, butter, water and a spoonful of thickening. Onions were among the few vegetables reliably available and affordable through a British winter, which is why the entry is marked seasonable then, and soups built on them have a long history as the food of thin months on both sides of the Channel. The rice flour is characteristic of the period and kept well, and it turns up throughout nineteenth-century English cookery in soups, puddings and invalid dishes. The costing in pence, which accompanies many of the recipes in the book, was part of what made Beeton's household management so useful to the middle-class mistress budgeting for a kitchen.