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Onion Soup Maigre

A light French onion soup made with onions, butter, flour, water, salt, sugar, egg yolks, cream, and served over bread strips.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Onion Soup Maigre

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter and fry the diced onions until well cooked.

  2. Stir in the flour and then add the water.

  3. Boil until the onions are tender.

  4. Season with salt and sugar.

Finish and serve

  1. In a bowl, mix the egg yolks with the cream or milk.

  2. Remove the soup from heat and stir in the egg mixture without boiling.

  3. Place the bread strips in a tureen and pour the soup over them.

  4. Serve hot.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Onions
Cooked down slowly in butter, they become sweet and form the soup's main body.
Butter
Fat that frying the onions in carries flavour and browns them.
Flour
Thickens the liquid so the soup has more body.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the soup when stirred in off the heat.
Cream or milk
Adds richness and softens the flavour, and carries the egg yolks into the soup.
French roll
Soaks up the hot soup, giving the dish its bread texture.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg mixture off the heat. Egg yolks thicken when heated, but if the soup boils after they are added they can curdle and turn grainy. Removing the pan from the heat first and stirring gently keeps the mixture smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, sugar, egg, cream):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, sugar, egg, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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