French Onion Soup
The beauty of onion soup is that it is simple to make and needs little advance planning. Most of us have onions, a little butter, some stock and white wine on hand. If not, they are easy ingredients to procure. The tears are the only unavoidable pitfall as you slice the onions - there is no avoiding it. My onion goggles, a gift from a friend, have never worked. I’ve tried chilling the onions first, burning a candle as I chop but that doesn’t help either. However, a good, sharp knife does. If you slice your onions cleanly less onion juice, which is a lachrymator, or type of tear gas, will spray forth to irritate your tear ducts. Luckily for the cook this disagreeable side effect is tamed by cooking.
Cut the onions in half lengthwise and then slice.
In a large frying pan over medium heat melt the butter. Add the onions and stir to coat with the butter. They will fill the pan, but don’t worry they will cook down. Season with salt and add the bay leaves. Cook stirring now and again until softened but not coloured, about 30 minutes. Lower the heat after about 15 minutes when the onions begin to stick to the pan.
Transfer the cooked onions to a large saucepan and then add the wine to the frying pan and bring to a boil. Deglaze the pan using a wooden spoon to scrape up the browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Add them and the liquid to the saucepan along with the stock and season with pepper. Bring to a boil over medium heat, lower the heat and simmer gently for 20 minutes. Remove the herbs, check the seasoning and then add the sherry.
Preheat the broiler and toast the bread slices lightly. Set the heatproof soup bowls on a baking sheet and ladle in the soup. Top each bowl with a toasted bread slice or two then the cheese. Broil until the cheese is melted and bubbling.
Jennifer McLagan
Jennifer McLagan has been called courageous, a contrarian and even a little crazy. Well in these dietarily correct times, she is definitely a provocative iconoclast who challenges us and makes us rethink our relationship to what we eat. And while she creates delicious recipes she believes that food is more than recipes. So equipped with a quirky sense of humour, a taste for the bizarre, and bowerbird tendencies she delves into food’s history, myth and culture adding to the literature of food and cooking. Her books garner prizes everywhere, BONES won the James Beard Best Single Subject Cookbook award, was a winner in the Gourmand World Cookbook Award, and a finalist in the IACP cookbook awards. FAT won the Gourmand World Cookbook Award for Best Cookbook Cover, the Silver Sprout Award, and both the IACP and James Beard Awards for Best Single Subject Cookbook. It was also named Cookbook of the Year 2009 by the Beard Foundation and is short listed for Cuisine Canada awards. But her publisher just wishes they’d sell better.