Onion Soup Gratinee: or, Every bit as good as I hoped

"Oh, go eat a boiled onion!"

Onion Soup Gratinee 3 white or yellow onions 3 tbsp butter or margarine (or cooking oil if desired) 6 cups beef stock 1 clove garlic, chopped (if desired) 2 tbsp chopped parsley (fresh or dried) Salt and pepper to taste 3 tbsp grated cheese (we recommend provolone) ¼ loaf French bread, sliced to desired thickness Have a large casserole dish ready. Quarter the onions lengthwise and slice thinly. Melt the butter in a soup pot. Add the onions and cook until slightly golden. This will take a while, so have patience. If using butter, be sure to stir it often or else it will burn onto the bottom of the pot. Add beef stock and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes. While the pot is simmering, put the bread slices onto the bare oven racks. Then heat oven to 400°. Remove the bread from the oven when it is dried. After the soup has simmered 10 minutes, remove from heat and add the garlic, parsley, salt, and pepper. Pour into the casserole dish, and lay the bread slices on top. Sprinkle with the cheese. Bake until the cheese is browned on top, about 10 minutes. Note: If you have single-serving baking dishes, that is even nicer than baking the soup in one large pan. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933 via The Internet Archive

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book, 1933

As the temperature dips in and out of freezing, heating up the oven for the express purpose of baking soup seems more justified than it did a week ago. And so, when no one was around to whine about the smell, I dared to bring forth an onion.

You can tell that this book comes from an era when we were economizing on time as much as money. Instead of chopping the entire onion into tiny pieces, we just had to cut it up like this. The onion didn't even have time to make me cry.

Less than two minutes after I got the onion out of the refrigerator, we were ready to heat up the saucepan. Now, because this cookbook came out in the middle of the Depression, our recipe calls for "butter or butter substitute." And so, with the recipe's blessing, I defied a century of cooking purism and put a big spoonful of cheap spreadable margarine into the pot.

 

This is period-correct economization.

And so, it was time to get our star ingredient off the cutting board and onto the stove!

I was kind of surprised that this soup contains onions and nothing else. I know it's called onion soup, but most soup recipes tell you to throw in a few other things besides the title ingredient. Truly, economizing was no joke in 1933.

We have learned that caramelizing onions takes a very long time. But you can also expect to spend quite a while at the frying pan if your recipe merely calls for "softened and lightly browned." For those who aren't using cooking oil like it's the 21st century, you should know that you need to keep stirring this the whole time because the butter (or butter substitute) will otherwise want to burn onto the bottom of the pan.

 

I had the audacity to leave the pot unattended and clean off the countertop. (After learning that onions require patience, I soon let myself get used to this sort of stovetop neglect.) Only a minute or so later, I returned to find that we had a few blackened spots on the onions. Because we are economizing, I didn't throw them out and start over.

You wouldn't have thrown this away if Old Man Depression was knocking on your door.

I've seen a lot of people say that recipes from this era are underseasoned, and I agree that a lot of them are. But I think the tiny seasoning amounts in most ingredient lists were meant to be starting points that you, the home cook, would expand on. But I have to credit the recipe writers for using a truly huge amount of parsley in this recipe. This is exactly as much as the ingredients list calls for, and not a speck more. Perhaps fresh parsley would have been better, but we are economizing.

At this point, it was time to put our bread on top and get this into the oven. Our recipe calls for "One-fourth loaf of French bread," which I was only too happy to purchase. Even today, French bread is only one dollar per loaf at the grocery store near me. But then I started wondering: was French bread already a thing in grocery stores in the 1930s? I know that no grocery store today is complete without a rack of baguettes, but was that already the case in 1933? (Of course, supermarkets didn't really exist then, but that's another matter.) Or did most bakeries sell cheap French bread in those days?

Anyway, today's recipe taught me that bread shrinks when you toast it I cut enough slices to cover this pan exactly. But after getting them out of the oven, I had to add two more to cover the empty space. 

In case you forgot that the Depression was on, this recipe calls for only three tablespoons of cheese to sprinkle over enough soup to serve a medium-sized family. Obviously, I let myself be a bit more extravagant than that. Provolone seemed like a great match, but I couldn't find any in brick form. I was mildly irked at having to pay the deli-counter markup for sliced cheese. But a good onion is worth it.

You can see the non-toasted last-minute bread already getting soggy, while the oven-dried bread is still perfectly fine.

After baking for ten minutes, the cheese was browned on top like every good casserole ought to be.

This soup tasted unexpectedly French in a way I couldn't explain. But it was also a lot better than a boiled onion has any right to be. The bread on top, despite being thoroughly dried out in the oven, got very soggy but kept a very thin layer of toasted crispness top. Some people might find that comforting, but I would rather make croutons and serve them on the side. However, I would definitely eat this again, and often.