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Potage Du Lundi
Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a saucepan, add two Spanish onions finely sliced, two ditto leeks and one crushed bean garlic, gently brown for twenty minutes or until a good brown colour, stirring once in a while, then add two tablespoons flour; constantly stir on fire five minutes. Moisten with two quarts broth, season with teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, then gently boil forty-five minutes. Add two ounces grated Parmesan or Swiss cheese; mix well, sharply beat two whole eggs on a plate, add them to soup; mix while cooking two minutes, pour potage into a soup tureen and serve with six slices French bread, toasted.
An onion-and-leek soup thickened with a roux and finished with egg and cheese — essentially a Monday soup built on Sunday's leftover broth. Two details decide whether it works: the depth of the browning and the handling of the eggs.
- The browning is the dishTwenty minutes over gentle heat is the minimum for onions and leeks to reach a real brown; in a wide, heavy pan it may take thirty to forty. Stop short and the soup is pale and thin-tasting, since nothing else here contributes colour or sweetness.
- "One crushed bean garlic"Read as a clove. "Bean" of garlic turns up in some older English-language cookery texts, possibly rendering the French gousse (pod), though the derivation is not established. One clove for two quarts is restrained by current taste; two or three will not unbalance it.
- Spanish onionsStill sold under that name — large, mild, pale-skinned. Two of them is roughly 1½ to 2 lb once sliced, which is the right volume for two quarts of broth. Ordinary yellow onions work and brown a little faster.
- The rouxTwo tablespoons of flour into two tablespoons of butter plus the onion moisture makes a loose roux. Five minutes of constant stirring cooks out the raw flour taste; keep the heat moderate so the flour does not scorch against the browned onion residue.
- BrothTwo quarts of whatever stock the house had — veal, beef or chicken. Use unsalted or low-sodium stock and taste before adding the full teaspoon of salt, particularly as the Parmesan is salty.
- The eggs are the hingeBeaten whole eggs poured straight into two quarts of simmering soup will scramble. Take the pan off the heat, whisk a ladleful of hot soup into the beaten eggs first, then stir that back in and return it to low heat for a minute or two. It should thicken slightly and never boil again.
- CheeseAdd the grated Parmesan or Swiss cheese off the boil and stir until it melts; boiled hard cheese turns stringy and can separate into oily threads.
- Yield and serviceTwo quarts and six slices of toast means six servings. The bread is served alongside or laid in the bowls, not baked under a cheese crust — this is not gratinéed onion soup.
Potage du lundi — Monday soup. The name points to a soup built on broth already in the house rather than on a defining ingredient, though the link to Sunday's leftover pot is a plausible reading rather than a documented one. Instead of the cheese-crusted crock of gratinéed onion soup, it is thickened with a flour roux and bound at the end with beaten egg, a liaison technique that runs through French bourgeois cookery and recalls older sops and panades in which bread, broth and egg did the work of a meal.