Cheese Soup
(Southern France.) Peel, slice, and fry 6 onions with 1/4 pound of ham, minced, and 2 ounces butter. Add 1/2 pound bread-crumbs, 3 pints good white stock,--preferably chicken,-salt, pepper, and a blade of mace. Cook for 1/2 hour, add 1/4 pound grated Parmesan cheese, and yolks of 2 eggs. Strain it by pressing it through a sieve, and serve at once.
A bread-thickened onion soup finished with Parmesan and egg yolks, closer to a French panade than to anything a modern cook would call cheese soup. Two things decide whether it works: the onions and the yolks.
- The hinge: yolks off the heatBeat the yolks with a ladleful of the hot soup, stir that back into the pot, and keep the pan below a simmer from then on. Once the soup boils the yolks scramble and no amount of sieving will make it smooth again.
- Onions want time, not colour"Fry" here means sweat until soft and golden over medium-low heat, 20 to 25 minutes. Browned edges will read as bitter in a soup this plain, since there is nothing but stock, bread and cheese to hide behind.
- Bread-crumbsStale crumb torn from a plain white loaf, not the dry sandy crumbs sold in canisters. Half a pound is roughly 4 to 5 cups loosely packed; commercial dried crumbs would absorb far more liquid and give you paste.
- Three pintsIf the book is using American measure, read this as 6 cups (48 fl oz); on imperial pints it would be 60 fl oz. Have another cup of stock warm on the side, as the bread will keep drinking as it stands.
- HamA quarter pound of dry-cured ham, minced fine, is a seasoning here rather than a meat. Prosciutto ends or a scrap of country ham do the job; wet-cured deli ham adds water and little flavour.
- A blade of maceOne piece of the dried outer covering of nutmeg. If you have none, a scant pinch of grated nutmeg substitutes; remove the blade before straining either way.
- StrainingPressing three pints of bread and onion through a sieve is heavy work. A food mill gives the same texture in a fraction of the time; a blender is faster still but yields a slicker, more modern body.
- ParmesanFour ounces is about a cup and a half finely grated. Add it off the heat with the yolks so it melts rather than stringing, and salt only after, since both the ham and the cheese arrive salty.
- YieldSix generous first-course servings. It thickens considerably on standing and does not reheat gracefully once the yolks are in, so make it to serve.
Bread, onions and cheese are the standing trio of southern French country soup, and this is a genteel version of the sort of soupe à l'oignon or panade that used stale bread as its only thickener long before flour roux became standard in home cooking. The Parmesan rather than Gruyère is worth noticing: Italian grating cheese is often said to have travelled the Mediterranean coast freely, and Provençal kitchens are generally thought to have used it as readily as anything made north of them. The finish of egg yolks strained through a sieve belongs to an idea of refinement in which a rustic dish earned a place at a dinner table by being made perfectly smooth. Books of this kind, collecting dishes region by region for English-speaking readers, were part of a wave of culinary travel writing, produced when middle-class American and British households were beginning to treat European regional cooking as something to be catalogued and copied at home.