Happy Marriages

Vegetable Broths, Meat Stocks and Consommés, and All Types of Mixed Vegetable and Meat Soups

Appears in
top 1000The New Making of a Cook
The New Making of a Cook

By Madeleine Kamman

Published 1997

  • About
IT IS BELIEVED THAT ONION SOUP WAS CREATED BY THE FRENCH KING LOUIS XV from a bottle of flat Champagne and a few onions on an occasion when he came back famished from a joyous night in eighteenth-century Paris. It may be, but onion soup made with plain water and onions has been the fare of the poor from time immemorial, not only in France but all over the Old World, where it could be indifferently served as breakfast, dinner, or supper fare.

Over the last century, la soupe à l’oignon became the specialty of all the bistros and cafés around the old “Halles” or central market of Paris, now transferred to the modern functional market of Rungis. The soup remains, though, and Parisians, after a late and happy night, still enter the same old bistros in the wee hours of the morning for an invigorating plate or bowl of their ancestral awakener.