Panades and Onion Soup

Rational habits permit of discarding nothing left over, and the use to which leftovers (and their economic allies, the wild things of nature) are put is often at the heart of a cooking’s character. Half-dried bread—that which is not reduced to crumbs or croutons or used in stuffings—is sliced (completely dried out, an attempt at slicing would break it into pieces) and put aside for soups. Many French peasants still begin every meal with a great tureen half filled with dried crusts of bread over which is poured a boiling broth. And a pot-au-feu, a garbure, a bouillabaisse, or an onion soup without crusts of dried bread is unthinkable. But the mere presence of bread in a soup does not constitute a genuine panade, which for most of the French, is but a memory and, for many a detested one, recalling the boiled bread and water on which, as children, they were nourished of an evening.