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Soubise Soup
Put into a saucepan two thinly sliced onions, four thin slices of bread, one-half pint of milk and two pints of water. When boiling, mix with the above ingredients two ounces of butter, and salt and pepper to taste. Stew them slowly by the side of the fire until the onions will mash to a pulp. Pass the soup through a fine hair sieve. return it to the saucepan, add the beaten yolks of two eggs, and stir it by the side of the fire until thick. Pour the soup into a tureen, and serve with sippets of toast. Spanish Soup, Parisian Style Chop up four large onions and fry them in a little butter. Add a small quantity of sugar, and when the onions are of a light golden color put them into a saucepan with two quarts of warmed broth, a little parsley, and a bay leaf, and boil for eight minutes. Place some thin slices of toast in a tureen, arranging them in layers, sprinkle with pepper, pour the soup over them and serve.
Two soups have run together in this page: the soubise proper, thickened with egg yolk, and a French-style onion soup that follows on. Both are simple, and both hinge on heat control.
- The hinge: the yolks must not boilOnce the beaten yolks go in, the soup has to stay below a simmer — roughly 175F — or it will scramble into grainy threads that no sieve will rescue. Temper the yolks with a ladle of hot soup first, then return the mixture to the pan off direct heat and stir until it coats a spoon.
- "By the side of the fire"On a coal range this meant the cooler edge of the hob, away from the firebox. On a modern burner it is the lowest setting, or a heat diffuser; the recipe sets no time for the onion stewing stage, only the test that the onions will mash to a pulp, which may take half an hour or more.
- MeasuresHalf a pint of milk is one cup and two pints of water is four cups, giving about five cups of liquid before reduction. Two ounces of butter is half a stick. The recipe gives no yield; five cups would stretch to about four first-course servings.
- The bread is the thickenerFour thin slices of ordinary white bread, cooked to nothing in the liquid; the recipe does not say whether to remove the crusts. Modern sandwich bread tends to be softer and sweeter than a period baker's loaf, so a plain white loaf or a day-old baguette gives a cleaner result.
- Hair sieveA fine-mesh conical sieve or chinois does the same job. A blender first, then the sieve, is faster and gives a smoother purée than pushing stewed onion through by hand.
- SippetsSmall triangles or cubes of toasted bread, cut about an inch across and served floating or alongside. Sippets were often fried in butter as well as toasted, though the recipe here calls for toast.
- The second recipeSpanish Soup, Parisian Style is a separate dish. The two quarts of warmed broth are unspecified, though beef is the likely intention; eight minutes of boiling is short because the onions are already cooked in the pan, and the sugar is there to help them colour, not to sweeten. Season the toast layers well, as the broth carries most of the salt.
Soubise is the French kitchen's standing name for anything built on a purée of onions — a sauce, a garnish, or as here a soup — and is traditionally credited to the household of the eighteenth-century Prince de Soubise, though the attribution is the usual sort of kitchen legend rather than anything documented. What distinguishes the classical soubise from plain onion soup is that the onions are stewed pale and soft rather than browned, then puréed smooth, so the flavour is sweet and mild instead of caramelised. Oscar Tschirky's placing of a browned Parisian onion soup directly after it, on the same page, shows the contrast neatly: same vegetable, opposite treatments. The soubise is finished with an egg-yolk liaison.