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Oilla Espagnole
Neatly peel six small, very sound white onions. Cut them into halves, then finely mince and place in a saucepan with two tablespoons melted butter; gently brown to a golden colour, which will take about fifteen minutes, being careful to stir once in a while. Add two tablespoons flour, mix well with a wooden spoon and heat for five minutes. Moisten with two and a half quarts broth or hot water; any chicken or beef bones on hand can be added. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, cover the pan and let slowly boil for fifty minutes. Lift up the bones, skim the fat from the surface, add the whites of three eggs and stir well with a wooden spoon for two minutes. Serve with six slices French bread toasted to a nice golden colour.
A thin onion broth thickened with a light roux and finished with egg white. The whole thing is straightforward; the only steps that mislead are the egg whites at the end and the sheer volume of liquid.
- The egg whites are the hingeBeat the three whites loosely first, take the pan off a hard boil, and dribble them in while stirring so they break into fine threads rather than one rubbery raft. If you want a clear consommé instead, the whites must go into cold or barely warm broth and then be brought up slowly and strained out — the recipe as written keeps them in the soup.
- Quantities and yieldTwo and a half quarts is ten cups of liquid. The pan is covered for the fifty-minute boil, so little is lost to evaporation. Six slices of toast suggests six servings.
- "Cut them into halves, then finely mince"Halving is only to make the mincing easier. What matters is that the pieces are small and even, or the fifteen-minute browning will scorch the thin edges before the rest colours.
- Browning the onionsFifteen minutes over moderate heat gives golden onions, not the deep mahogany of a modern French onion soup. Stir more often than "once in a while" once they begin to take colour.
- The rouxTwo tablespoons butter to two tablespoons flour, cooked five minutes, is a blond roux. Add the liquid hot and in stages, stirring, to avoid lumps.
- The bonesRaw bones added to already-hot liquid contribute little in fifty minutes. Roast them first, or simply use a good stock and skip them; either way lift them out and skim the fat as directed before the eggs go in.
- White pepperHalf a teaspoon of white pepper leaves no dark specks; black pepper will speck the surface and tastes somewhat different.
- ServingThe toast is served alongside or floated at the last moment, not baked under cheese. Take the slices to a dry, golden crisp rather than leaving them soft.
Olla is simply the Spanish word for the round earthenware cooking pot, and by extension for what came out of it — most famously the olla podrida, the long-simmered meat and chickpea stew of the Spanish table. What appears here under a Frenchified spelling, Oilla Espagnole, has almost nothing to do with that dish: it is a browned onion soup bound with roux and finished with egg white, the sort of thing a hotel kitchen could turn out in an hour from stock already on the stove. That gap between name and contents is characteristic of international cookbooks, which often filed a foreign name onto a familiar preparation.