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Cheese Soup (Crème Au Fromage)
Toss a small chopped onion in 2 tablespoons butter without browning; add 1 pint each of milk and water; when nearly boiling stir in 1/4 cup grated Parmesan or Swiss cheese, salt and pepper to taste, add 2 slightly beaten eggs and stir until soup thickens. It must not boil or eggs may curdle. Pour over toasted bread fingers in tureen.
A quick egg-thickened cheese soup of the old French crème type, meant to be served over toast in a tureen. Everything depends on the last step.
- The hinge: no boiling once the eggs go inBring the milk and water only to a bare shiver, pull the pan off direct heat, then add the eggs in a thin stream while stirring. Above roughly 180F the eggs set into curds and the soup breaks.
- Temper the eggsWhisk a ladleful of the hot liquid into the beaten eggs first, then return the mixture to the pan. This is far more reliable over a camp fire or a burner you cannot regulate closely.
- QuantitiesA pint each of milk and water is 2 cups each, about 1 quart of liquid total. That serves 3 to 4 as a first course.
- Cheese amountA quarter cup of grated Parmesan is a light hand for a quart of liquid; half a cup gives a more pronounced flavour. The recipe's "Swiss" would in practice mean a Gruyere- or Emmental-type cheese.
- SaltSeason after the cheese is in and melted. Parmesan carries a good deal of salt of its own, and the volume of liquid makes overshooting easy to do and hard to fix.
- The onionSweat it in the butter over low heat for 5 to 8 minutes until translucent. The recipe specifies "without browning," which keeps the onion flavour mild rather than sweet-caramelised.
- Toast fingersCut day-old bread into strips and toast until dry and firm, not merely coloured. Soft toast disintegrates the moment the soup hits it.
Crème soups of this kind are a familiar shape in nineteenth-century French cookery: a thin broth or milk base finished with beaten egg, a technique related to Italian stracciatella and the older English "caudle." Cheese soups over toast belong to the same thrifty family as onion soup gratinée and Welsh rabbit, in which stale bread and a small amount of hard cheese are stretched into a supper. The ingredients are few and it cooks in one pot in a matter of minutes, provided the heat is low enough to keep it below a boil.