[Sca-cooks] onion soup not period?

[Stefan li Rous]

Rhiannon Cathaoir-mor asked:
> My question is about the onion soup remark posted earlier (I'm way behind on
> my emails);  has it really been stated that french onion soup is not period?
> I find that really hard to believe, because it is one of the simplest dishes
> to prepare, and was not until recently considered a fancy dish.  I will
> grant that calling it french onion soup particularly may not be period, but
> unless I'm losing my mind, we're frying up an onion here and then boiling it
> in some broth.  (I will grant that the sprinkling of cheese and floating
> bread may be recent affectations).  How is this not period?
>
> Inquiring minds just want to know.

You're not the first to ask about this. I asked a very similar question
here some time ago. Most of the period onion soups we have are, I think,
white soups in an almond milk or similar base. I think the darker, broth
based onion soups show up later. I'm not sure that we came to a
conclusive answer. If someone can point me to some early in period,
dark onion soups, I'd like to hear about it.

You might want to look at some of the soups in this file:
onion-soups-msg   (21K) 10/18/00    Period onion soups.
http://www.florilegium.org/files/FOOD/onion-soups-msg.html

This is hardly a comprehensive survey of onion soups and may well be
subject to some type of bias such as folks not giving dark, broth
based period soup recipes because the white ones are more different
than the "ordinary" onion soups of today. My wife does make a
modern white-based onion soup which she got from a modern cookbook,
so these are still around.

--
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
   Mark S. Harris            Austin, Texas          stefan at texas.net
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****