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Onion Soup

A broth-based soup with caramelized onions, French roll, egg yolks, and cream, garnished with boiled onions.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,827 recipes. Both carry 2-nonanone, which smells fruity, floral. The science ↓

Onion Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the onions

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

Assemble and enrich

  1. Place half of the sliced French roll in the broth and the other half at the bottom of the soup dish.

  2. Beat the egg yolks with the cream and stir them into the soup to prevent curdling.

  3. Once the eggs are incorporated and cooked, pour the soup over the French roll in the dish.

Garnish and serve

  1. Garnish with boiled onions and serve.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Onion + eggtop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,333 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

Broth
Forms the liquid base, providing moisture and the savoury flavour of the soup.
Onions
Soften and turn sweet during slow stewing, building the soup's main flavour.
French roll
Soaks up the broth, becoming soft and holding the soup together in the dish.
Egg yolks
Thicken and enrich the soup as their proteins gently set with heat.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture that softens the broth's sharpness.

The step that matters

Adding the egg and cream mixture. Egg proteins set when hot, so they can curdle and turn grainy. Stirring the beaten yolks and cream into the soup steadily spreads the heat and keeps it smooth, so the soup should stay off a hard boil.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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