[Sca-cooks] onion soup not period?

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Also sprach A F Murphy:
>Remember, when I posted a while back about making a brown stock (or, in
>my case, not making a really brown stock) for soup, Muirdach gently
>explained to me that you don't use brown stock for soup anyway. You
>explained to him that us weird Americans do...

Weird Americans (tm) have been known to use brown stock for soups,
either because (a) they are using canned beef broth, and I have never
seen canned white beef stock; it appears to be invariably brown, or
(b) for certain specialty soups such as French Onion Soup, which in
America may have about as much to do with France, conceptually, as
French Fries (i.e. little to none), various English soups such as
Brown Windsor Soup, Mock Turtle Soup, etc. Most Vegetable Beef soups
(a style that may be influenced by the canned soup industry) seem to
use brown stock.

It may well be that today, white stock is preferred for soups in
France for some reason of tradition or taste, and we all know
Americans have precious few traditions and even less taste (or at
least that is our rep).

>So, what does that say about the question of brown stock in soup in
>period Europe? If it isn't standard now, at least in fine French
>cooking, is the problem not that it didn't happen, but that we (perhaps
>incorrectly) think it should? Am I making sense?

Maybe you're making this a bit more complicated than it needs to be
;-) . Or maybe you're simply correct. Maybe I need more tea... .

Lessee. What I'm saying is that while medieval recipes are full of
references to beef broth, I don't know how much of it is made
specifically _to be stock_, rather than as a byproduct of boiling
beef. This would be more akin to a white beef boullion, generally
more neutrally flavored, with perhaps less gelatin. The modern
French, while they do make brown stock for various purposes, don't
seem to tend to use leftover (cooked) bones very often. Rather, they
roast raw bones to caramelize them for brown stock, and the stock is
not the byproduct of another cooking process, which I suspect is the
case for a lot of medieval recipes.

Of course, the French preference for white stocks in soup may
actually support the idea that little or no brown stock was used in
period; it may simply be a throwback to medieval eating habits,
especially middle and lower-class eating habits. Bear in mind that in
France, the evening meal for the lower classes and country people
featured soup quite often in past centuries (and for all I know,
today); the name of the meal in French (and in English) is
etymologically linked to soup. Poorer people probably tended not to
have ovens or fuel for stuff like roasting bones (assuming they even
had such things for cooking meats), whereas brown stocks for brown
sauces to go on grilled, roast, and sauteed meats, seems to suggest a
somewhat higher socio-economic position than the guy pictured supping
in "The Bean-Eater".

What I know for sure is that I've never seen any evidence in medieval
recipes to suggest that brown stock was used, or even that stock made
from bones is what is being called for, rather than broth made by
boiling meat -- the frequent requirement being "good broth of good
beef," etc.

>I know I've seen a modern recipe for onion soup that called for chicken
>stock, which was supposed to be from a French restaurant.

This prolly makes sense, given what both Muiredach and I have said.
It may also simply be the preference of the chef.

Adamantius