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watercolor onions

Heather’s Onion Soup (v)

“Potage of onion: Cut your onions into very thin slices, fry them with butter, and after they are fried put them into a pot with water or with pease broth. After they are well sod, put in it a crust of bread and let it boile a very little; you may put some capers in it. Dry your bread then stove it; take up, and serve with one drop of vinegar.”

—The French Cook, Francois Pierre La Varenne (1651)

Ingredients:

  • 3 Tbsp unsalted butter
  • 3 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
  • 6-8 large yellow onions peeled and thinly sliced
  • 1-2 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
  • 2 quarts vegetable stock (8 cups)
  • 1/2 cup dry white wine
  • 1/2 cup sherry
  • 20 mushrooms
  • 1 Tbsp all-purpose flour
  • ½ tsp black pepper, plus more to taste
  • 8 to 12(½-inch) slices French bread (from 1 loaf)
  • 2 cups grated Gruyère (or similar) cheese

Directions:

  • Melt butter and meld with olive oil in the bottom of a heavy Dutch oven or similarly large heavy pot over medium heat.
  • Add onions and ½ teaspoon salt, stir and cover, letting onions soften for 5 minutes. Remove lid and let onions caramelize until golden brown over low to medium heat, stirring occasionally and adjusting heat as needed to prevent onions from browning too quickly. The caramelization process may take 45 to 60 minutes. You can add a bit of water if things get out of hand.
  • In a skillet, brown mushrooms in 1 T butter and 1 T olive oil until they have released their liquid (15 minutes). Add wine and sherry to the pan and allow mixture to come to boil. Add this to the soup pot.
  • In the same skillet, melt 2T butter and add 2T flour to make a roux. Add to the soup pot.
  • Add broth, pepper, and remaining salt (to taste) to the onion mixture and heat on medium uncovered for 10 minutes.
  • While heating soup, arrange slices of bread on a sheet pan and brush pan side with olive oil. Top each slice with cheese. Heat in a 375 degree oven until cheese is melted and bubbly.
  • Ladle soup into deep bowls and top with cheese bread.
onion soup

My friend Heather, she’s vegetarian. I love many things about her including the motivation she provides me to cook vegetarian meals. Why is onion soup usually made with beef broth? It’s so easy to make it vegetarian. And, back in the 1650s, ye olde potage of onions (above) doesn’t mention a slip of beef or meat anywhere. In those days, onions were the food of the lesser heeled, yet also believed to be restorative. Both still true.

This potage with its bread accompaniment is actually a sop… the last meal of the day in medieval times, a broth with a crust of bread, for both sustenance and a way to ingest the broth without need for cutlery.

Onions

How easily happiness begins by   
dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter   
slithers and swirls across the floor   
of the sauté pan, especially if its   
errant path crosses a tiny slick
of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.

This could mean soup or risotto   
or chutney (from the Sanskrit
chatni, to lick). Slowly the onions   
go limp and then nacreous
and then what cookbooks call clear,   
though if they were eyes you could see

clearly the cataracts in them.
It’s true it can make you weep
to peel them, to unfurl and to tease   
from the taut ball first the brittle,   
caramel-colored and decrepit
papery outside layer, the least

recent the reticent onion
wrapped around its growing body,   
for there’s nothing to an onion
but skin, and it’s true you can go on   
weeping as you go on in, through   
the moist middle skins, the sweetest

and thickest, and you can go on   
in to the core, to the bud-like,   
acrid, fibrous skins densely   
clustered there, stalky and in-
complete, and these are the most   
pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare

and rage and murmury animal   
comfort that infant humans secrete.   
This is the best domestic perfume.   
You sit down to eat with a rumor
of onions still on your twice-washed   
hands and lift to your mouth a hint

of a story about loam and usual   
endurance. It’s there when you clean up   
and rinse the wine glasses and make   
a joke, and you leave the minutest   
whiff of it on the light switch,
later, when you climb the stairs.

William Matthews, “Onions” from Selected Poems and Translations, 1969-1991. Copyright © 1992 by William Matthews. Reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved, www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.
Source: Selected Poems and Translations 1969-1991 (1992)

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