Last week I noted that January is National Oatmeal Month. It is National Soup Month as well, for much the same reason. We long for warm, comforting foods in January, and soup fits that bill.
National Soup Month was invented by the Campbell Soup Company in the 1980s. However, Campbell’s commercialism shouldn’t keep us from enjoying our warm soup.
One of my favorite soups at this time of year — or any time of year, really, but it is hearty so January is ideal for it — is my mother’s French Onion Soup. She of course preferred to call it “Soupe à l’Oignon,” Francophile that she was.
I’m not precisely sure when Taffy, as I called her, learned to make this soup. She had two French cooking teachers. The first was Madame Continénie, her landlady in Paris during her junior year abroad in the late 1930s.
Madame taught my mother how to make many basic dishes. She also tried to make her teenage guest more sophisticated. The first endeavor was more successful than the second. My mother had many wonderful qualities, but sophistication was not one of them.
Luckily, she didn’t need to be sophisticated or soignée. She was direct, fun and smart. Those qualities stood her in good stead throughout her life.
Taffy went on to study French cooking at a Le Cordon Bleu school in New York in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Her teacher there, Madame Béran, taught her a lot about cooking and also about French.
In Taffy’s little handwritten cookbook, she sometimes inscribed recipes in French even when she had clearly learned them from Americans. She adored the French language.
Whoever taught her to make it, this soup was a staple of my youth. It uses one of my favorite techniques, caramelizing onions. Gently frying onions for a long time always makes the house smell homey and delicious.
Taffy’s recipe gets additional robust flavor by using beef broth and red wine instead of the chicken broth and white wine that are more usual in this country.
Please do not misunderstand me. I will happily slurp down onion soup however it is made. I do think that the darker, more flavorful broth and wine make it even tastier.
Whenever my mother went to Paris, she made a point of visiting Les Halles, the popular open-air market that was founded in the 12th century. The market was known for its Soupe à l’Oignon. One could find this soup there at any hour of the day or night, and it was always freshly made and fabulous.
My parents took me to Les Halles first when I was 7 and had never tasted onion soup. Like my mother, I fell instantly in love with the soup and with the bustling market in which it was served … although I was small enough to need help getting up onto a chair there to eat.
Taffy was saddened when the market was torn down in 1973 to make room for an underground shopping center that had none of the original’s character and charm. The area is now a mall. Luckily, Taffy, who emphatically did not believe that her beloved Paris needed a mall, never learned of that final transformation.
The old Les Halles market lived on in her kitchen and continues to do so in mine … in January or in any other month. As Marcel Proust noted when he wrote of madeleines, flavor is an ideal vehicle for transporting us into the past.
This particular flavor made me very happy last week when the weather was disgusting.
If you’re in a hurry or don’t have oven-proof bowls or crocks, don’t worry about putting the cheese on toasted bread and broiling it. Just serve the soup with grated cheese on top and toasted bread on the side.
Serving the soup with the broiled bread and cheese (“gratinée”) is more authentically Parisian. And quite delicious.
I probably have no need to tell you that my mother had oven-proof crocks, which she bequeathed to me. In fact, she had, and I have, two sets of crocks. The one I prefer has little baskets to hold the hot soup when it comes out of the oven.
Taffy’s French Onion Soup
Ingredients:
for the soup:
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) sweet butter
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
6 medium onions, finely sliced
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
salt and pepper to taste (Start with 1/2 teaspoon salt and 8 turns of your pepper grinder.)
1 generous teaspoon flour
4-1/2 cups beef broth
1/2 cup red wine (a little more is fine!)
for the topping:
sliced baguette (enough to cover the soup in the 4 crocks, but it doesn’t hurt to have extra. The toasted slices make great crackers for dip or cheese)
a drizzle or two of extra-virgin olive oil
grated or sliced Gruyère or other Swiss-type cheese as needed (Last week I ended up using “Swiss” slices from the grocery store, which were inelegant but sufficient; I used 2 slices per crock.)
Instructions:
Melt the butter in a Dutch oven. (I used my 5-1/2-quart pot. The freshly sliced onions take up a fair amount of room, although they do shrink as they cook.)
Add the oil and the onions. Cook fiercely over medium-high heat for a few minutes; then turn down the heat and continue cooking, stirring every 5 to 10 minutes, until the onions begin to turn golden. This will take from 1/2 hour to 1 hour. While the onions are caramelizing toast the bread. (See below.)
Stir in the mustard, the salt, the pepper, and the flour. Stir for 1 minute or until the mixture is smooth. Slowly add the broth and the wine.
Bring the soup to a boil, turn it down, cover it, and simmer it for 15 to 20 minutes. After the 15 minutes, taste it and see whether it needs a little more salt. (You shouldn’t need a lot; the cheese is salty!)
You will know that the soup is ready when it tastes warm and flavorful. The taste of the wine should be perceivable but not be strong.
To toast the bread slices, preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly rub the pieces of baguette on both sides with a little olive oil, or spray them with an olive-oil spray. This is a balancing act. The oil helps the bread toast and adds flavor. You also don’t want the pieces of bread to taste oily.
Place the bread pieces on a rimmed cookie sheet and bake them for 20 minutes, turning once. Set them aside to wait for the soup.
When the soup is almost ready, preheat the broiler. Ladle the soup into 4 ovenproof crocks, place toasted bread on top of each crock (you will need 1 to 3 slices, depending on the size of your baguette), and cover with cheese.
Broil the soup on high until the cheese melts and turns golden brown. Serve within a few minutes, but warn your fellow sippers to be careful. Onion soup can get very hot and burn the tongue. Serves 4.
Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning cookbook author and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.