I'd been meaning to make this for a long time. On Saturday I stocked up with sufficient onions etc to construct some this Sunday for lunch, as well as having enough onions for the rest of the week. We do seem to get through a lot of onions in this household.
I did some research before starting to cook, which left me somewhat confused. To flour, or not to flour? Wine, or beer? How much sugar? And should it be white or brown? Delia Smith, or an untested recipe from the internet? And what had happened to the piece of French bread I had earmarked for the croutons? Turns out Younger Son had consumed that already, so it was good old English bread. But at least that meant that I felt less guilty about using cheddar rather than gruyere.
As usual, I ended up with a hybrid... but it tasted good.
800g onions, peeled and thinly sliced. This resulted in a lot of tears.
50g butter
3 cloves of garlic, chopped finely
1/2 level teaspoon granulated sugar
One can of beer (I was too mean to use wine; Tesco Everyday Value Bitter was fine)
2 pints of beef stock (2 elderly Tesco beef stock cubes and one beef Oxo cube)
Salt and pepper
And, for the cheese croutons:
4 slices bread
160g grated cheddar
Melt the butter in a heavy bottomed pan, and cook the onions, garlic and sugar gently together for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Delia assured me that it would be browning nicely after 30 mins, and this browning would improve the colour and flavour of the soup. It wasn't even starting to look as if it was browning after 30 mins, so I turned up the heat for another 5 mins, stirring all the time. The onions reduced in volume somewhat, but stubbornly refused to brown.
I shrugged, poured the stock and beer in, brought it to the boil and simmered gently for a further hour and 15 minutes, then assembled the croutons, as follows:
Toast the bread; put it on a baking tray and cover with grated cheese. Try not to leave any bare bits. Pop the tray of cheesed-up bread under the grill for about 3 minutes until it is bubbling and starting to brown. While the cheese is grilling, put the soup into bowls. Float one "crouton" (or "cheese-on-toast", as we call it around these parts) in each bowl. (Yes, I know you're supposed to put the soup in bowls under the grill with floating croutons in it, but my soup bowls are wide and shallow with big rims and I don't think I could fit even 2 under at once.)
The family were somewhat bemused by the concept - "Cheese-on-toast? In onion soup?? but tucked in with gusto. I will definitely prepare this again, but next time I think I will slice the onions in a food processor as slicing them lovingly by hand was a rather tearful experience.
