After a foray into chocolate in the last couple of entries, I return to Fast-Day (meatless) recipes for the period-important Lent season, still currently in session. (Whether chocolate was allowed on fast days is a debate I will touch on if I get back to Thomas Gage’s Mesoamerican chocolate adventures.) I did two such recipes as they are quite simple and both are not far off from their present-day equivalents; they are classics, you might say. They appear in the first (1747) edition of Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery, though the dishes appear earlier and, in one case, her recipe only has minor changes from one that was printed almost forty years before. The recipes are “An Onion Soop” and “Pain Perdu, or Cream Toasts [or French Toast].” I will again present the recipes first and follow each with a little explanation and history.
Recipes
“An Onion Soop.”
Ingredients
- 125g (about ½ cup) butter
- 5 medium onions, diced.
- 1 tbsp flour
- 850 ml (about 3 ½ cups) water
- 25g of stale white bread, grated, or breadcrumbs
- Salt to taste (I added ½ tsp)
- 1 egg, lightly beaten
- 1 tsp vinegar
Instructions
In a large pot, melt your butter over medium high heat. Cook until the foam subsides and it has browned just a little.
Add your onions and cook on medium high heat, stirring frequently, almost constantly near the end, for 15 minutes. They should also begin to colour at the end of the cooking time.
Add flour and stir constantly for 2-3 minutes, making sure nothing sticks and burns.
Pour in your water and add your bread.
Cook on medium high for 10 minutes.
Season to taste with salt and remove from heat.
In a small bowl, mix your vinegar into your eggs with a fork. A spoonful at a time, add some soup to the bowl and mix well. This will temper the eggs and prevent them from curdling when added to the soup. After you mix in 4 or so spoonfuls of soup, add the entire bowl back into your soup pot.
Serve with bread if desired.
Notes
Because there is not a massive difference in concept and ingredients as compared to modern versions of both these recipes, I tried to stay fairly close to the process that Hannah Glasse describes in the historical text. For instance, as compared to a modern (French) onion soup, the cook time is relatively short – you do not sweat and then caramelise the onions for an hour or so. I kept the heat high to get some browning in the 15 minutes she called for, but there is still a little texture in the onions, where in a modern version, they are cooked almost to disintegration. I would have liked the extra flavour the slow cooking brings but the slight bite of the onions was an interesting difference.
Glasse’s “Onion soop” recipe is an informative mixture of older and more modern techniques. Adding stale bread crust and eggs to thicken a soup or sauce was an age-old practice but she combines that with the use of flour, which would have been relatively new. Richard Bradley, a Cambridge Botany professor wrote The Country Housewife and Lady's Director and it was published in 1736. He includes in it a soup “very frequently used abroad” which is similar but which he says: “the People abroad call Soup a l'Ivrogne.” This can be translated as “Soup of the Drunkard” and he does say you can add a glass of white wine, but the base is the same. Onions are fried in butter and seasoned, water is added and then it is thickened “with as many Eggs as are necessary.” The point being, even a few years before Glasse’s book, flour was not a thickener in a similar recipe. Adding flour to the onions and then cooking it out is something standard in an onion soup today.
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| The frontispiece from a sixth edition copy of The Country Housewife and Lady's Director. Held by the Library of Congress. |
Similar would be the newer technique of adding small amounts of soup to the eggs/vinegar mixture to temper them before adding it to the pot. Bradley instead instructs the reader to keep stirring when adding his thickening eggs “to prevent the Eggs from Curdling.”
Overall, this was a nice warming thick soup with a pleasant flavour, while not being the prettiest dish out there. It misses the deep taste of slow-cooked onion and probably beef stock instead of water but the texture, as I said, was different and maybe a little better.
“Pain Perdu, or Cream Toasts" [ie. French Toast]
Ingredients
- ½ a large French loaf, cut into 2.5 cm/1-inch slices.
- 280 ml (about 1 1/4 cups) whipping cream
- 140 ml (about 2/3 cup) milk
- 2 tbsp sugar, plus more for finishing
- 1 tbsp cinnamon
- 3 eggs lightly beaten
- Clarified butter for frying (I used about 2 tbsp)
Instructions
On a rimmed platter or a couple large plates, lay out your bread slices.
Mix the cream and milk together in a bowl.
In another small bowl, mix the cinnamon and sugar.
Place your beaten eggs in a third bowl, large enough to fit your bread slices.
Pour your cream/milk mixture evenly over all your bread slices. Turn the slices a couple times to make sure they are well coated and both sides are beginning to absorb the liquid.
While turning, take large pinches of your cinnamon/sugar mixture and sprinkle, making sure all sides of your bread slices are well covered.
Place a frying pan over medium low heat and melt some clarified butter. (See this entry on Pancake Day for my pretty simple version of Thomas Keller’s method of clarifying butter.)
When your butter is melted and the pan hot, carefully, possibly with two hands, take a slice of soaked bread and dip it in your bowl of beaten eggs. Again, carefully, shake off excess egg and place in the pan.
Fill your pan with about three slices and fry until golden brown, about 4 minutes on each side.
Working in batches, repeat until you use up your slices.
Keep your finished toasts warm, and serve, sprinkling with more sugar to taste.
Notes
Pain perdu is literally “lost bread” probably because it was a way to use up bread just before it went bad.
In English, the phrase shows up in French-English dictionaries in the seventeenth century. One that when through many editions - A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues by Randal Cotgrave – has an interesting definition. “Pain perdu. A broath [broth] made of wine, Rose-water, and sugar, egges, and bread.” I would probably prefer the newer versions.
Glasse’s recipe, which I used, probably came from Royal Cookery; or, The Complete Court-Cook (1710) by Patrick Lamb, who served in the kitchens of English monarchs from Charles II to Queen Anne, who was on the throne when the book was published. Glasse cuts out some options and general instructions that are superfluous to the actual recipe but the ingredients and quantities are the same.
Again, because this was very much like modern French toast, I followed the two-step (soak the bread and then dip in egg) coating process to see how it differed. This tastes pretty much like modern French toast, though I think when the egg cooked on the outside it became crispy but protected the cream-soaked bread and left it fairly soft. That inside is not my favourite texture, but the outside is very nice and the taste is good overall. Though I cannot say I am a French toast expert by any means.
This next week will probably be another Lent-like recipe before a tansie for Easter; details, however, are currently unknown.
I received a packet of skirret seeds in the mail today, so if against all odds, I can grow something, I will make a skirret pie in a few months.
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