As you’ve probably deduced by now, my real passion is for baking: cakes, biscuits, puddings, and all manner of other sweet goodies. That said, I do try to shoehorn as many vegetables and fruit in to the rest of my day to balance things out and one of the easiest ways to manage that is with a homemade soup. In fact, I have soup for dinner more than anything else. It’s practical, wholesome and filling I usually manage 3 dinner times of very low effort from one evening’s work. This is particularly useful when I’ve spent the afternoon baking, and conjuring up tea for my daughter.

I go through phases of soup. For quite a long time I made up batch after batch of a curried sweet potato and pea soup. Cauliflower cheese is a timeless classic but requires an iron will to not eat most of the grated cheese before it makes it into the soup. If you read my post about Lentil, leek & coconut soup , you’ll know that I constantly need a supply of it in the freezer for Joyce. Around Christmas I make quite a bit of roasted parsnip soup and whenever there are butternut squash in the shops, I’ll roast and blitz them with a generous dollop of creme fraîche.

However, until 2 weeks ago, I had never made French onion soup and I’m not quite sure why. I live in Paris and love a good onion soup – surprisingly sweet and deeply savoury at the same time, soothing and filling with its cheese-topped croutons. When I was a student living on rue Quincampoix in the Marais, I would even buy tins of it.

It may have something to do with my husband and his family’s surprising onion-phobia.; I say surprising as they are French, and a bowl of onion soup is about as traditional a French dish as you can get. Anyway, I’ll be making much more of this soup from now on. Maybe I’ll win them over one day …

This recipe does require a little patience but not your constant attention, so it would be ideal to get it started when you have something else to do in the kitchen. 

I stumbled upon the original recipe on the BBC Good Food website, of all places, but found they were over-optimistic with their timings so I’ve tweaked it to give it to you straight. (Here’s the link for reference: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/3020694/french-onion-soup)

To achieve that sweetness you really need to cook the onions gently and the end result is worth it.

Deeply savoury yet surprisingly sweet French onion soup

Ingredients

For the onion soup:

• 50g butter
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1kg onions, halved and thinly sliced
• 1 tsp sugar
• 4 garlic cloves, sliced thinly
• 2 tbsp flour
• 250ml white wine
• 1.3l beef stock (from stock cubes or pots is fine)

For the topping:

• slices of bread to sit neatly in your soup bowls (preferably a ‘tradition’ baguette, sourdough or another bread that won’t instantly disintegrate in the soup)
• grated cheese (gruyere would be authentic here but I love a nice mature comté and most hard cheeses will go very nicely with the onion/garlic/beef-y soup)

Method

Melt the butter with the oil in a large saucepan, then add the onions, put the lid on the saucepan and fry/steam for 10 minutes to start softening the onions.

Next, take the lid off, add the sugar and keep cooking until caramelised. This may take 30-40 mins. You’ll need to stir fairly often and once the onions start to brown, add the garlic and make sure you don’t let it burn.

Sprinkle over the flour, then crank up the heat and gradually pour in first the wine and then the stock. When the soup starts to boil, turn down to a simmer, pop the lid back on the saucepan and leave for 15 minutes until the flavours have melded.

Heat up your grill whilst you ladle soup into as many bowls as you have people eating (!) On top of each one, place a slice or slices of bread to almost cover the top of the soup and sprinkle the grated cheese over generously. Pop the bowls under the grill to melt the cheese and serve up the piping hot bowls of delicious savouriness.