When I was growing up in the 1950s in the San Francisco Bay Area, French restaurants always listed onion soup — soupe à l’oignon gratinée — on their menus. The soup was beef broth and onions. On top was a slice of toasted bread slathered with melted cheese. So common was this preparation that one of the country’s largest food producers, Campbell, sold, and still sells, a canned soup they call French Onion Soup. Inside the can is a mixture of beef broth and onions. (The cheese and bread you have to provide yourself!) I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but in all my trips to France I haven’t found onion soup like this.
While researching another article, I came across many onion soup recipes and one fact began to stand out — in France, onion soup is generally not made with beef broth. When I took a more systematic approach of checking every French-language source I possess in my library, I only found recipes that used water or chicken stock. (There was one exception, a recipe from a Lyon restaurant that uses the broth from pot au feu.) When I expanded my search to include translations from original French sources, beef broth began to seep into the recipes, but the author usually admitted that the recipe was “adapted” from the French original.
A search on the internet using the search term “soupe à l’oignon” yielded 1,620 pages as possible matches. I found many French-language sources that used beef broth, but upon further examination I found that these pages were from Canada, not from France.
So what difference does it make if the French make their onion soup with water or chicken broth and the rest of the world makes French onion soup with beef broth? Not much, except that if your mind says onion soups should taste like beef broth, the soup in France may be a bit disappointing. This is unfortunate since onion soup in France can be great, just different from what one may expect. The first time I prepared an onion soup made with water instead of beef broth, the flavor seemed lacking, but as I worked my way through a large bowl, the subtleties of the flavors began to shine as my expectation for the flavor of beef broth began to dim.
Onions have been plentiful and inexpensive for thousands of years. To make a soup that combined this plentiful vegetable with water seems like a logical thing to do. Adding bread to the mixture also seems like something that could have existed for a long time. In La Cuisine du Marché, Paul Bocuse presents a recipe for gratinée lyonnaise that uses the natural sweetness of onions to their fullest. (When this same recipe is listed in two separate English-language cookbooks that were translated and adapted from the French, the water is replaced by beef broth.) Bocuse claims this to be the original onion soup preparation, ideal for late night snacks, not the “imitations” formerly prepared in Paris at the famous Les Halles marketplace. If you’re willing to try an onion soup that doesn’t use beef stock, give this recipe a try. It even fits most definitions of vegetarian food!
English-language cookbooks are fond of saying that onion soup was a favorite of locals stopping by the central Paris open markets after the theater or cabaret. As famous as the onion soup of Les Halles may have been, I have not been able to find a recipe purporting to be actually from this famous marketplace. In Saveur Cooks Authentic French, the editors can’t seem to bring themselves to use a recipe from France for soupe à l’oignon gratinée so they print one that they have created from “combined” sources. If you think onion soup has to be made with beef broth, it’s a good one to try.
After looking at a large number of onion soup recipes, I’ve concluded that it is possible to create a generic recipe for soupe à l’oignon. There may be lots of recipes out there, but the differences are slight.
©2001, 2014 Peter Hertzmann. All rights reserved.
