Onion soup is one of the timeless staples of French cuisine
but the way that we eat it today
with gruyere cheese melted on a crouton floating on top of the soup
well that's actually pretty modern, so I decided I wanted to see what onion soup was
with this recipe from the reign of Louis XIV for potage d'oygnons au lait, onion soup with milk.
So thank you to Bright Cellars for sponsoring this video as we make onion soup from 1651
this time on Tasting History.
The French have a saying 's'occuper de ses oignons' or look after your own onions
basically it means mind your business
but today I'm going to take the literal translation and mind my onions,
or rather I'm going to mind the onions of Francois Pierre de la Varenne
because this recipe for onion soup comes from his 1651 cookbook 'Le Cuisinier François'.
"After your onion is cut very thin and sautéed in butter until it's well browned,
cook in a little water well seasoned with salt and pepper. After it is done, add milk to it and boil it.
Baking your crusts dry, serve it promptly."
Rather simple yet different enough I think from a modern French onion soup that it should be quite interesting.
The biggest difference being that instead of cheese and stock
he uses milk which is actually quite common in onion soup recipes from history.
Now while this recipe was written and published in 1651 it is also appearing in a cookbook that will be published
in 2023 specifically that cookbook which will be published in one week
and to celebrate the release of the Tasting History cookbook I am getting to do this really, really cool partnership
with one of our sponsors here Bright Cellars.
They have been wanting to celebrate the cookbooks release for some time and we've been trying to figure out how to do it,
and we finally came up with a way. I sent them the cookbook and then they had one of their sommeliers
pick several wines that I like that will pair well with several of the dishes.
Usually with Bright Cellars you take a simple seven question quiz and then Bright Cellars
sends you wines based on your tastes but in this case you're getting wines based on MY tastes.
It is the Tasting History wine special.
Pleasure Principle Old Vine Zinfandel which is full bodied and can stand up to the spice of 16th century samosas.
The juicy and fruit forward Hazelaire Merlot to accompany Lafayette's French duck with shallots.
And even my favorite Batik Shannon Blanc which is meant not to accompany a recipe but to make a
white hippocras, perfect for the springtime. I'll be making it when my mom comes to visit.
So I'm super excited to share these wines with you whether you drink them with something that you actually make from the cookbook or
with something else that you're eating or by themselves, they go well alone.
I'm just excited to share them with you but because it is to celebrate the release of the cookbook
it is only available for a limited time but it is a wonderful way to try out Bright Cellars
before actually subscribing.
So click the link in the description and you can get my exclusive wine bundle with Bright Cellars with
20% off when you order within the next 2 weeks.
Also it will arrive with a bit of a note from yours truly.
So thank you Bright Cellars.
Thank you anyone who orders with Bright Cellars,
and thank you La Varenne for sharing the recipe that we are making today.
So La Varenne is actually extremely interesting as a cook because
he lives on the cusp between two major culinary epochs.
The late Medieval and Renaissance on one side
and French haute cuisine on the other.
The first is awash in spices and sauces thickened with bread crumbs and sweet and savory flavors
are often mixed together in a single dish
but French haute cuisine ditched all of that in favor of more fresh herbs and fresh vegetables
along with complicated stocks, creamy sauces, and of course they relegated the very
sweet flavors or sugar in general to dessert only at the end of the meal.
And a lot of Varenne's recipes kind of straddled both worlds
but I feel like this one really is in the latter.
It is close to French haute cuisine.
See Medieval cuisine was often trying to fit as many different flavors into one dish as possible.
Polysavory is the term coined by Ken Albala, wonderful food historian and friend here on the show
but this dish and French haute cuisine really was more monosavory I guess.
Their goal was to showcase one single flavor with other ingredients
just to complement rather than compete with that flavor,
and this one is obviously onions but when cooked well onions don't need a lot of help
because they are just so complicated and rich.
So for this recipe what you'll need is: two to four onions.
If they're large then two if they're small then four, it really doesn't matter you can't have too many onions,
and you can use yellow onions because that's what I prefer or you can use white.
4 tablespoons or 57 grams of salted butter, one and a half cups or 350 milliliters of water,
a half teaspoon of salt, a half teaspoon of pepper.
You'll probably be adding more salt and pepper as you go along,
but start with a half teaspoon of each and then ramp it up from there.
3 cups or 700 milliliters of whole milk at room temperature and 8 to 12 slices of French baguette.
So to begin take the onions peeled and slice them in half from the root to the stem.
Then chop them into fairly thin slices.
They don't need to be perfect or uniform because they're all going to end up kind of looking the same in the end.
Then take a large saucepan and melt the butter and then with heat at a medium low temperature add the onions.
They'll likely fill the entire pot but eventually they will cook way, way down.
Just keep them moving around around every couple of minutes so they don't burn.
And as they begin to shrink and darken up you can raise the heat
but just be careful you don't want them to burn so keep them moving around.
It'll take about 45 minutes to an hour for them to get to the dark golden brown that you want.
Your entire house will smell of onions in the best possible way.
Once they get to a dark golden brown pour the water into the saucepan and use a wooden spoon to scrape the sides and the bottom.
And then add the salt and pepper and allow the soup to come to a simmer.
Then cover the saucepan and allow it to simmer for a full 15 minutes.
Then pour in the milk and with a medium heat let the soup slowly return to a simmer.
Later recipes start to add other ingredients to make sure that the milk doesn't split,
but this one doesn't and it's probably going to split a little bit
but as soon as it starts to boil you want to take it off the heat and it will split less.
Now while the soup is cooking or really any time before you could even do it the day before
you want to prepare your baguette, just make sure that they are nice and stale.
If they're not really stale then put them in the oven at a low temperature for about 30 minutes to dry them out
but once they're nice and dry set them in the oven at the top rack at 400 degrees Fahrenheit or 205 Celsius
for about three to five minutes on each side just until they're well browned.
And while they toast you can contemplate ruminate even on the history of French onion soup.
As an old French proverb that translates to if you have no Capon be glad you have bread and onion,
and while I'm guessing it actually means be grateful for what you have
it kind of gets you halfway to a decent onion soup because onion soup is really, really simple,
and it has been for a very long time.
Residue from pots found from ancient Greece and Rome
show that soups where onion was the main ingredient have been made for thousands of years.
Onions were sometimes seen as a food for the poor but
they were also eaten by the wealthy sometimes for their medicinal qualities or in ancient Rome
to gear up one's libido.
Soups with onions thrived throughout the Middle Ages but very often at least in the written recipes that we have
onions kind of take a back seat to other ingredients in the soup.
Even by the 17th century many onion soup recipes were still filled with peas, and parsley, and other herbs and vegetables,
but the basic onion soup like the one that we're making today eventually became a staple of French cuisine
even amongst the aristocracy. Now how exactly that happened is not entirely known
but there are two stories that kind of tell, tell the story.
One is definitely more believable than the other because
the other which I'm going to say first is is just so not true.
It gives credit to King Louis XV not just for popularizing but for actually inventing the first onion soup
a full 75 years after the recipe that we're using today was written down.
It claims that Louis just got back from a hunting trip and he was famished,
so this French King who had never even dressed himself decided to
go into the kitchen and whip himself up a snack
but in the kitchens of one of the wealthiest Kings in Europe
there weren't any ingredients except for some onions, some butter, and some champagne.
So with no staff around and no culinary experience he whips up the first onion soup.
That's I guess based with champagne.
There are so many holes in this story that I'm not even going to dignify it with a rebuttal.
Now the second story is slightly less outlandish
and it is told to us by none other than Alexandre Dumas the author of 'The Three Musketeers'.
He says that it was actually Stanislaw Lescyński, Duke of Lorraine and former king of Poland who made the dish popular.
Didn't invent it but made it popular and as this Duke of Lorraine former king of Poland
was actually the father-in-law of King Louis XV and was a well-known gourmand,
he's often credited with inventing the rum baba as well
there's at least some possible legitimacy to the story.
Dumas says that in the case of onion soup Lescyński was traveling to Versailles
when he "stopped at an inn of Chalons where he was served an onion soup so delicate and so well crafted,
that he refused to continue his journey without learning its preparation."
So he goes into the kitchen and starts to learn how to make this soup.
And "Neither the smoke nor the smell of the onions, which brought tears to his eyes,
could distract him from his task. He observed everything, took note of it,
and went to his carriage only after being sure he'd learned every aspect in the art of making excellent onion soup."
Now at least the story doesn't claim that he invented onion soup but I also kind of question
the claim that he was the one to bring it to the aristocracy
seeing as onion soup recipes had been used in the cookbooks of the aristocracy for for about a hundred years previous
Go figure.
Regardless by the 19th century onion soup had become a staple dish amongst all people in France
but the version that we know and love today actually came from the commonfolk, specifically of Paris.
At Les Halles, a massive Parisian food market, founded in the 12th century
soup was sold to the people of Paris every day for hundreds of years.
The author Emil Zola described it in the 19th century. "The bright tin cauldron, full of broth, was steaming over a little low stove,
through the holes of which came a pale glow of embers. From a napkin-lined basket the woman took some thin slices of bread
and dropped them into yellow cups; then with a ladle she filled the cups with soup."
Now the soup he's actually talking about there was a cabbage soup but onion soups were served right alongside it,
and the people of Paris in this area
ditched the milk from many of their recipe and replaced it with veal or chicken stock.
And sometime during the 19th century they also added gruyere cheese to the dish
but it wasn't actually in the dish as it is today.
Alexandre Dumas says "Grate gruyère cheese and serve it separatel,y in a saucer, for enthusiasts."
Now served out a big cauldrons at a market it makes sense that the cheese would kind of be served on the side
but as restaurants grew up around the market they began to incorporate cheese into the dish.
They also gave it perhaps the first written claim that it was good for a wine hangover.
"If you should wish to taste this soup so appreciated by the disciples of Bacchus,
prepare it according to the following instructions..."
This recipe from 1913 then goes on to explain basically a modern French onion soup
except that the cheese and the bread are not on top
but on the bottom of the bowl and the soup is poured over it.
Then in 1927 a recipe for soup 'soupe à l'oignon gratiné'
puts the cheese and the bread on top and has you melt the cheese over it.
And that is how French onion soup is going to be served pretty much everywhere you order it especially outside of France today
except when you come to this house where I still serve at the old-fashioned way,
1651 style.
And here we are onion soup with milk.
First can I tell you how good my house smells right now it.
I just wish I could make this every day even if I wasn't eating it.
It just smells so good. Here we go.
It's so good.
Hm!
So so good.
It's just when I taste this there's just like this warming calm that floods over me.
It's so homey and simple,
but so, so flavorful when you cook the onions for a long time
they get sweet but also a little a little savory.
You know they still have that onion flavor in them but they're just- they're so complex,
they're so delicious and the thing is I knew this would be delicious.
Usually I'm tasting something for the first time but I made this for the cookbook
so I knew it would be good and that's why I did it for this first recipe,
our first episode of recipes from the cookbook that I haven't done already on the show because I knew it was going to be fantastic
and everyone should try it.
So don't forget to order your copy of 'Tasting History the Cookbook'
and your bottles of wine from Bright Cellars to accompany the dishes from the book
and the next time I see you I'm going to be a published author here on Tasting History.