Food Notes: 3/3
French onion soup, McDonald's burgers, Alfredo sauce and more
Last week everyone was talking about French Onion soup, so I decided to turn it into a pasta sauce.
I day started out the contemplating a dish that was as easy as red sauce but a totally different flavor profile. What about onions, I thought to myself, surely these lowly root vegetables could be easy to make. I was thinking about a variation of Alison Roman’s shallot pasta dish, but different. That’s when it struck me. If I could soupify Cavatelli and Broccoli, surely I could pasta-fy a soup.
Turning French Onion soup into a pasta wasn’t an original idea. A quick Yahoo! (jk, I used Google) of the web revealed a few recipes, and I looked over this one for ingredient inspiration. Off to the grocery store I went.
Onion soup dates date back to ancient Greece and Rome, though of bread and melted cheese is probably a Medieval era addition. What really helped make this a popular, inexpensive dish was the development beef bouillon cubes.
There are early English cookbooks with recipes for dehydrated soups as early as 1694. These aren’t exactly bouillon cubes we use today, which came later. Napoleon Bonaparte relied on a version of bouillon to his armies fed, and by the middle of the 19th century, industrialization had created an inexpensive product available to everyone.
French Onion Soup gained traction in post-war America with a reputation as a low cost, delicious, and filling dish. For example this 1947 article from an Oklahoma newspaper describing it as “stimulating, satisfying, and easily digested.” By the 1960s it was becoming a standard both in restaurants and home cooks. It helped too that Julia Child taught America how to make it on her PBS show, and the simple soup added a bit of European exoticism to the otherwise pre-made American diet.
The actual soup version of French Onion Soup isn’t hard to make and we’ve done it before. It’s better with Gruyère cheese cheese and an oven safe ramekin. We use vintage pyrex bowls.
I didn’t want soup. I wanted a pasta dish. The temperature had dropped outside again. (De Blasio was right about that Groundhog).
Pasta-fying French Onion Soup proved to be a true one-pot meal making clean up easy, and since the savory dish proved delicious, we agreed it deserved a spot in the semi-regular rotation.
Pastafied French Onion Soup
INGREDIENTS
4 onions
2 cloves garlic
8 oz white mushrooms
8 oz baby Bella
2 tablespoons butter (swap for more olive oil for a vegan alternative)
Dash onion powder
Dash garlic powder
Splash lemon juice
33 oz beef stock (Swap for mushroom stock for a vegetarian alternative)
Pasta
INSTRUCTIONS
Thinly slice the onions lengthwise
Slowly Caramelize onions (this will take longer than any recipe suggests unless you use a mandolin to make paper thin onion)
Finely chop garlic
Slice mushrooms
When onions have caramelized, add butter, mushrooms and garlic
Season with onion powder, garlic, salt, and pepper
Splash in lemon juice
Add beef stock and simmer for a minute or two until it comes back to temperature
Add pasta and cook
Add a splash of water if the moisture level gets too dry before pasta is cooked
Serve with Parmigiano cheese.
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