Onion Soup
2 cups finely chopped onion 2 tablespoons butter or bacon drippings 4 cups rice water or vegetable stock 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon white pepper 1/8 teaspoon paprika 1 tablespoon caramel 2 tablespoons chopped parsley Cook onions and butter or drippings in covered saucepan, shaking pan often. When onions are tender add to rice water or stock; boil 5 minutes; add salt, pepper, paprika, caramel and chopped parsley. Serve with croutons.
A meatless, thrifty onion soup that gets its colour from browning caramel rather than from browning the onions. Two of its ingredients need translating before you start.
- Rice waterThe starchy water left from boiling rice, used here as a free body-building stock. Modern equivalent: the drained liquid from cooking a cup of rice in plenty of water, or simply vegetable stock, which the recipe already offers as the alternative.
- CaramelNot candy and not caramel sauce, but burnt-sugar colouring: sugar cooked to near-black and let down with water. Period books usually give it as something you make and keep; the closest modern shop equivalents are gravy browning or Kitchen Bouquet. It supplies colour and a faint bitterness; a tablespoon is a lot, so add half and judge.
- The hinge: sweat, don't brownThe onions go into a covered pan and are shaken rather than stirred over high heat, which points to softening rather than colouring — the caramel is doing the colour work. The recipe gives no time or heat; a low flame and roughly fifteen to twenty minutes should see two cups of chopped onion tender.
- The five-minute boilShort by modern habit, and deliberately so: the onions are already tender. If your onions are still firm, simmer longer rather than boiling harder.
- Bacon drippingsA standard fat of the period and worth using if you have it; it gives this otherwise meatless soup a savoury base. Butter alone may taste flatter by comparison; a bay leaf or a spoonful of soy sauce helps if you go meatless.
- Seasoning to tasteOne teaspoon of salt assumes unsalted rice water. If you use commercial stock, hold back and season at the end.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; four cups of liquid would serve about four as a first course. The parsley goes in at the end and should stay bright; add it off the heat if you are holding the soup.
This is economy cooking dressed as a French classic: no beef stock, no long-caramelised onions, no cheese-crusted crock. Royal Baking Powder Company's promotional cookbooks, of which the New Royal Cook Book is one, circulated free or near-free in large numbers in the early twentieth century, and their non-baking chapters lean on the food-conservation thinking of the period — save the rice water, stretch the onions, get colour from a bottle rather than from meat. Caramel colouring was a common pantry item in that era, when commercial gravy brownings were widely advertised, and it turns up in period soup and gravy recipes for precisely this reason: it makes a pale, cheap broth look like something long-simmered.