French Onion Soup

Twenty years, or so, of marriage presents a spectrum of changes. It's like a soup that we tend to and stir every day – adding and taking – the soup is always changing; but is always our soup.

Last year I noticed four soup crocks high up in the cabinet. Why do we still have these if we never use them? If the kids had ever seen them, they would have had no idea what they were. So, it was time for me to learn to make French Onion Soup – Jenny's favorite!

My Betty Crocker Cookbook, of course, led my way. I used the key element of surprise one night and served French Onion soup. To my surprise, everyone liked it! Since then, I have enjoyed many requests for my French Onion soup. That let me play around with the details of the preparation. I've settled in on the following for tonight's dinner:

Four large or six medium Vidalia® onions are quartered and sliced to generally match the natural thickness of the rings. I heat up Grandmother Jones' crock pot to medium heat, add a stick of butter (unsalted and, in my world, butter means butter), and plop the onions in. Give the onions a good stir so all the surfaces fairly share the butter. In time, the onions will clear. This means the plant cell cytoplasm came to a boil and steam burst the cell walls. Starch stored within the cytoplasm dissolves and oozes throughout the sizzling slices. Be patient and keep stirring occasionally. This is high drama, folks - sip something and read on. We've left biology and have entered a chemical world. Starches are a convenient way for nature to preserve and store sugars. With a little heat and the proper enzyme, the starch molecules that are dissolved throughout the onion break apart back to simple sugars. Sweet! With a little more heat and some oxygen (don't try this if you are fresh out of air) the sugars begin to oxidize. That's the light brown coating you've noticed on the onions and the bottom of the pan. Keep stirring more frequently now. The onions are caramelizing and are gaining a toasty and sweet flavor. Before you burn everything, stir in a couple tablespoons of flour. Let this brown slightly. Pour in four 10.5 ounce cans of Campbell's® Beef Consummé. Stir the soup, bring it to a boil, then shut it back to a simmer.

Taste your soup and sip something (like a Merlot or Cabernet). Reflect for a moment and smile. I reflect on those households thousands and hundreds of years past living through long winters in Europe's northern latitudes. They had onions available. Maybe they had access to cows; beef stock and cheese. Maybe they had some stale bread that was turning blue...

Finely shred about 8 ounces of Swiss cheese. Rest.

I am lucky to have married into four McCoy© soup bowls. I put chunks of toasted, stale sour dough french bread in each. Raise the top oven rack to leave about two inches between the bowl tops and the top oven element. Turn the broiler on.

Ladle about 1.5 cups of soup into each of the four bowls. The bread will float. Sprinkle about 1/3 cup of cheese on top of the bread and place the bowls in the oven. I keep the door open. When the cheese is bubbly and beginning to toast, hold your breath a little longer. Before you see smoke, the soup is ready to serve. Place each hot bowl on a plate at the dining table. Serve with a little red wine or a tall glass of cold milk.


As we sit down to dinner tonight, Katie asks "Daddy, where did French Onion Soup come from?" I smile and say "I think farm families in areas like France, Belgium, and Germany probably learned to make it after the last ice age. Nikko speaks up, "Dad, it would have been long after that" and continues with an accounting of European cultural and economic history. He focused in on Manorialism.


We shared lots of questions and answers around our humble onion soup tonight. We thought about families having onion soup on dark, cold nights during the middle ages. We thought about our differences from them – and about our similarities.

Twenty centuries, or so, of human history presents a spectrum of changes. It's like a soup that we tend to and stir every day – adding and taking – the soup is always changing; but is always our soup.