Onion Soup
Two large onions, slice and stew with 1 quart water, season with salt, pepper and butter; serve with crackers same as oysters.
A bare-bones onion soup from the era when "stew" meant a long, quiet simmer on the back of the range. The recipe gives no times or quantities beyond the onions and water, so the cook is expected to taste as they go.
- The hinge: cook the onions long enoughTwo onions and a quart of water will taste like onion water if pulled off early. Simmer covered for 40-50 minutes until the slices are fully collapsed and the liquid has taken on sweetness.
- Butter is the bodyWith no flour, cream or stock, the butter is the only richness here. Figure 2-3 tablespoons for a quart, and consider softening the onions in it first over low heat before the water goes in.
- Water, not brothThe original uses plain water, with no stock or meat of any kind. A light chicken or vegetable stock in place of the water makes a fuller soup.
- "Serve with crackers same as oysters"This refers to oyster crackers or split common crackers dropped into the bowl at the table, the standard American way of serving oyster stew. Plain saltines or oyster crackers do the job.
- Onion sizeFor a quart of liquid, aim for roughly 12 oz of onion in total.
- YieldA quart serves two generously or three as a first course, and reheats well.
This is the plain American cousin of French soupe a l'oignon, without the browned onions, the wine, or the raft of cheese-covered bread. Thin onion soups of this sort appear in a number of late nineteenth-century American household books, sometimes among dishes recommended for invalids. The instruction to serve it "same as oysters" points to oyster stew, a familiar benchmark for a buttery soup eaten with crackers, common enough on American tables that a writer could describe another soup by pointing at it. Onions were also credited with medicinal virtue in this period, and were held good for colds and coughs.