French Onion Soup

Wednesday Lunchtime

What better on a miserable grey damp day than a hearty bowl of French Onion Soup? This will always bring back memories for me of my time in Toulouse as an English Assistant at a lycée. After a long night out with the wonderful friends I made there, all students at the university, we would go back to Dominique and Eric's modest little flat and Bernard would whistle up a french onion soup before we would all finally admit the night was over. Happy memories indeed. I often wonder what became of them all....

So here I am, some 30 years later, sitting by myself in my kitchen in the High Peak, sheepdog by my side, surveying a rather dismal garden outside (and an equally dismal cat who's sitting on the steps waiting to be let in) enjoying the sweet beefy oniony cheesy delights of what has to be one of my all time favourite soups. It is really very simple to make (another of its great charms) and easy on the pocket too....except when you are skiing in Les Trois Vallees in France: we once spent a happy holiday trying to find the most expensive French onion soup on the mountain - and when we did (clocking in at about £15) it was a tiny micro-waved bowl of tastelessness which I had to send back three times to be reheated. But that's Courchevel 1850 for you...

I promise you that today's little treat costs nothing like that - and tastes a whole lot better.

So, I had three extra sweet, ready peeled white onions (Waitrose) in the fridge which badly needed eating up and were the impetus for this Gallic feast. Having removed the dodgy bits and sliced them as thinly as I could with a slightly blunt and slightly too small knife (sheer lethargy prevented me from sourcing the correct tool), I heated the remains of a bottle of pale olive oil (about 2 tablespoons) in a small non-stick casserole pan (delighted to get the bottle finished up so I could move on to a nice new one) and added the onions to sweat and soften without catching. At this point I also added two peeled and crushed cloves of garlic and a teaspoon of caster sugar. Now, if you get distracted, as I often do, and they end up a touch chargrilled this is not the end of the world as it simply adds a stronger oniony, slightly caramelised flavour to the soup. For once, however, I remained focused and my onions remained creamy white with no sunburn evident. This is how Bernard always liked them to be. I took them off the heat (just to be sure) while I made up a litre of beef stock using some natty little Knorr pots I found in the supermarket a while back (each pot makes up 500ml of stock). Obviously, you could also use your own homemade stock if you happen to be the sort of person who makes beef stock, or you could buy a large pot of fresh beef stock from you grocer/butcher/supermarket (delete as appropriate). I do find that 'fresh' stock can sometimes be a bit insipid so you might need to add some extra seasoning and flavour if you use that. 

So where was I? Ah yes, sweating onions and garlic. I added a naughty knob of butter at this point too, just to add some depth of flavour (the key job of fat). Once my stock pots had combined with my litre of boiled water and the onions were nicely softened, I poured the liquid into the casserole pan and gave it a quick stir. I then popped the lid-less pan into the middle of the roasting oven of the Aga (medium heat conventional oven) for 25 minutes or so to let the flavours of the onion and garlic meld into the beef stock. Meanwhile I found the small French stick I'd bought just yesterday and cut 4 angled slices, about 1cm thick, which I then toasted on the Aga till lightly browned on both sides (for once I didn't burn these either). You could just as well put them in the toaster or do them under the grill. Next I rootled around in the fridge for some grated cheese and was thrilled to unearth a packet of grated emmental, brought back from France and luckily only a few days out of date so still tasted perfect (trust me, I tried it first!). Time now for the soup to come out of the oven and some to be ladled into a lovely French-looking oven proof bowl (found in my local bric-a-brac shop), two of the toasts laid on top and the emmental sprinkled generously on top of them, before being popped back into the oven, a little higher up, to melt the cheese. 

Five or so impatient minutes later you have a bowl of unctuous golden goodness - of which the hardest part is waiting for it to cool down enough to eat (I now have a rather burnt tongue).

Et voila! A humble feast fit for a French King (or a Derbyshire housewife). Bon appetit!