French onion soup

French onion soup is a soup of onions, gently fried and then cooked in meat stock or water, usually served gratinéed with croutons or a larger piece of bread covered with cheese floating on top. Onion soups were known in France since medieval times, but the version now familiar dates from the mid-19th century. Onion soups have been popular at least since Roman times. Onions, a widely grown and generally inexpensive vegetable, were familiar in France, as elsewhere, from time immemorial. Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child comment in their Mastering the Art of French Cooking, "It is hard to imagine a civilization without onions". In general the onion was regarded as peasant food and the upper classes avoided it: in the middle of the 18th century a cookery book by the head chef to a French prince included a recipe for "peasant-style onion soup" – soupe à l'oignon à la Paysanne. The food writer Waverley Root comments that the origins of French onion soup may lie in Alsace, although the dish is popular throughout France and "apparently no region lays particular claim to it". Onion soups from other regions include the tourain from Quercy-Périgord and the ouliat from the Béarn. Although onions were plentiful and affordable by the poor, a medieval recipe in Le Ménagier de Paris, published in 1393, includes among its ingredients ginger and saffron – rare and expensive spices – making this version of the dish one for wealthy households. In his Le cuisinier françois, published in 1680, François Pierre de la Varenne offered two recipes for onion soup, in the first of which the onions are cooked in oil or butter and then simmered in water and meat broth. Hard-boiled egg yolks are added, and the finished soup is passed through a sieve.

Source: Wikipedia