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Oignon Soup, Bourgeoise
Cut four medium, white onions in half, then finely slice them. Heat two tablespoon melted butter in a large saucepan, add onions and cook until a nice brown colour, then add two tablespoons flour; stir well while heating one minute, pour in two quarts milk, mix with wooden spoon until it comes to boiling point then let slowly boil forty minutes, season with two teaspoons salt, one saltspoon cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg and mix well. Dilute one egg yolk with a gill cream, add to soup with half ounce good butter, mix while heating two minutes; remove, pour the soup into a soup tureen and serve with six slices of French bread, toasted.
A milk-based onion soup rather than the beef-broth version most cooks expect. The whole thing hinges on managing two quarts of milk over a long, slow simmer without scorching it.
- Guard the milkMilk with flour in it will catch on the bottom of the pan long before forty minutes are up. Use the heaviest-bottomed pot you own, keep the heat at a bare tremble rather than a boil, and stir down to the bottom every few minutes.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon. So roughly 1/4 teaspoon cayenne and the same of nutmeg — the cayenne is assertive at that level, and a scant pinch is defensible.
- GillRoughly half a cup (4 to 5 fl oz, depending on whether the measure is American or British). One yolk to that much cream is the finishing liaison, not a thickener; the flour has already done that work.
- Tempering the yolkWhisk a ladle of the hot soup into the yolk-and-cream mixture before it goes back into the pot, then hold below a simmer for the two minutes given. Boiling after the yolk is in will curdle it.
- Browning the onionsTwo tablespoons of butter and four sliced onions want fifteen to twenty-five minutes over medium heat to reach "a nice brown colour." The instruction reads faster than it cooks, and the browning is where the flavour comes from.
- Cooking out the flourOne minute of stirring is the minimum; two is better. Undercooked flour in a milk soup tastes of paste and no amount of simmering hides it.
- YieldTwo quarts of milk plus the cream makes six to eight generous servings, matching the six slices of toast.
- The toastServe the toasted bread alongside or float it at the last moment. This is not a gratinéed onion soup — there is no cheese and no run under the broiler.
"Bourgeoise" in French cookery of this period signals a plain, household treatment rather than a restaurant one. The version here belongs to the older, broader family of onion soups, which included versions thickened with flour and enriched with milk or cream as well as those built on beef broth; the cheese-crusted soupe à l'oignon gratinée that now monopolises the name is only one branch of it. The finish — an egg yolk beaten with cream, stirred in off the boil — is a classic liaison, a standard way of giving body and gloss to a soup. Onions were cheap, kept all winter in any cellar, and browned into something far richer than their cost, which is why soups like this turn up in household books on both sides of the Atlantic.