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Onion Soup Au Gratin
2 cups sliced onions 3 tablespoons Mazola 1 tablespoon Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 1/2 tablespoon Karo, Blue Label 5 cups brown soup stock (any kind) 6 large squares toasted bread 3/4 cup grated cheese Cook the onions in the Mazola and Karo until soft. Add the cornstarch and the stock and when boiling, season with salt and pepper to taste. Place a large square of toast in each soup plate, pour the boiling soup over and sprinkle with grated cheese.
CHINESE Soups are famous. Plain stewed tomato soup-clear broth poured onto quickly boiled cabbage-chicken broth with shredded mushrooms, are all wonderful appetizers, and real foods. Make these at home, flavor to taste with Karo, Blue Label, and thicken with a half tablespoon of Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch dissolved in water , to each pint. Serve with boiled rice.
They are simple and health giving.
A promotional recipe from a Corn Products Refining Company booklet, which is why corn oil, cornstarch and corn syrup all turn up in a French onion soup. It works, but a few of the brand-driven instructions need translating.
- Slurry the cornstarchAdding 1 tablespoon of dry cornstarch to oily onions and then pouring in stock reliably produces lumps. Dissolve it in a few tablespoons of cold stock or water and stir it into the pot once the soup is at a simmer, then boil a minute to lose the raw starch taste.
- The branded ingredientsMazola is corn oil, and any neutral oil or butter substitutes directly. Argo and Kingsford's are cornstarch. Karo Blue Label was the company's plain corn syrup; light corn syrup is the nearest thing on a modern shelf, and honey or a pinch of sugar does the same job here.
- Half a tablespoon of syrupThe recipe does not say why it is there; in a booklet selling Karo it may simply be product placement, though a little sugar will also help the onions colour. Modern practice gets a deeper flavour by cooking the onions slowly, 25 to 40 minutes over medium-low heat, until they are deep gold. The recipe's "until soft" undersells it: pale onions make a thin-tasting soup.
- QuantitiesTwo cups of sliced onions is roughly one and a half to two medium onions, somewhere around 8 to 12 oz. Five cups of stock across six squares of toast means small portions by current standards; four bowls is more realistic, or increase the onions to a full pound.
- Season at the endThe recipe seasons only after the stock goes in, which suits an unsalted homemade stock. Commercial broth is already salted, so taste before adding anything, and reduce or omit the salt if you are using a concentrate.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" is unspecified here; it could be a dry, hard grating cheese or simply a dried-out piece of store cheese. Gruyere or a Gruyere-Parmesan mix is the modern default for onion soup and melts better under heat.
- Making it a true gratinAs written the cheese is only sprinkled on hot soup and softens rather than browns. For a browned crust, use ovenproof bowls and run them under the broiler for 2 to 3 minutes until the cheese blisters.
- The trailing paragraphThe note on Chinese soups is advertising copy, not part of this recipe. Thickening a clear broth with a half tablespoon of cornstarch to each pint is the booklet's own suggestion; ignore it unless you want the texture.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets issued by the Corn Products Refining Company, the maker of Mazola, Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch, and Karo syrup, in the era when food manufacturers published whole cookbooks whose real purpose was to find new uses for their products. That explains the odd combination here: a soup that in France would be made with butter and finished with a good deal of bread and cheese is rebuilt around corn oil, corn syrup and a cornstarch thickener. Onion soup gratineed under cheese is generally traced to Parisian working-class cooking and is strongly associated with the all-night eating houses around Les Halles, but by the early twentieth century it had been thoroughly absorbed into American hotel and home cookery. The closing paragraph on Chinese soups, tacked on with no recipe of its own, reflects a period appetite for the exotic that rarely extended past a general claim that the food was simple and health-giving.