Skip to main content
Main

White Onion Soup

A soup of stewed onions, broth, French roll, egg yolks, cream, and garnished with boiled onions.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

White Onion Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a pot, stew the chopped onions in the broth over gentle heat.

  2. Add half of the sliced French roll to the broth.

  3. Beat the egg yolks with the cream and stir them into the pot to prevent curdling.

Serve

  1. Pour the soup over the remaining French roll slices in a serving dish.

  2. Garnish with small boiled onions before serving.

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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Onion + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,827 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Cream + peppertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  4. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Onion and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,827 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
Soften and sweeten as they stew, giving the soup its main flavour and body.
French roll
Thickens the broth as it soaks up liquid, adding body to the soup.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the soup, giving it a smooth, velvety texture when heated gently.
Cream
Adds richness and fat, softening the flavour and smoothing the finished soup.

The step that matters

Stirring the egg yolk and cream mixture into the pot. Egg yolks thicken when heated, but if the hot soup is too hot or added too quickly they can scramble and curdle. Tempering the mixture with some hot liquid first and stirring constantly helps keep it smooth.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cream, pepper. 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.

More onion soup recipes

French 31Brown 15with Milk 7White 5Bavarian 4Bermuda 4 See all 236 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes