The Cosiest Miso French Onion Soup with Cheesy Crumpet Croutes
Brown food at its best, and a little memory from another lifetime ago in Montreal...
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When was the last time you made French onion soup? I don’t make it enough. But every time I do, I’m awed by its brilliance - the alchemy of a few onions mingling with some broth (and admittedly in this recipe, a few other magic ingredients) to make something so much more than the sum of its parts. Something deep, dark and comforting, with real guts to it, that you end up slurping with more zeal the further down the bowl you delve, ribbons of caramelised onion quivering from your steaming spoon. And always, always topped with a soggy, bready crouton smothered in pungent melted cheese. It’s the sort of soup you crave when the temperature drops - particularly, I’d say - when it rains or snows. It’s something to have in the fridge, freezer or soup pot, ready to bust out when you come home soaked from running errands, commuting back from work or picking the kids up. It’s great on a hangover, filling but also nourishing and hydrating, with the faintest whiff of hair of dog. It’s for those days when you need warming up from the inside out, ideally when there’s time to take a nap after a couple of bolstering bowlfuls.
This recipe below is my current favourite version. Its savoury depths are amped up by the addition of a little soothing, sultry miso, and its cheesy crouton is a resplendent, cheese-saturated crumpet, whose pores ooze with the good stuff, sending strings of molten dairy down into the soup and probably your chin, too. If you can’t be bothered to make the soup, these cheese-stuffed, cheese topped crumpets are still good on their own. Just be sure to make double what you think you’ll eat. I used proper homemade, rib-sticking beef stock for this recipe, and it really does make all the difference if you can pop into your butcher and ask for some beef bones. My method is to roast them on root veg in a hot oven until caramelised and browned, and then gently simmer them for a few hours in plenty of water with a bit of star anise and onion, skimming off any impurities and fat, until you’ve got a lovely dark broth. If you don’t have time for any of that, homemade chicken or veg stock is the next best thing. Failing that, try and find a good quality shop bought bone broth - this one is top quality and award winning. Failing that, a stock cube will do it, but watch your seasoning as they always make for salty stock. If you’re vegetarian and still fancy making this, I’ve had success with using some dried wild mushrooms or porcini, along with a dollop of good old Marmite, to create an earthy base stock to add to the onions.
A Montreal Memory
Isn’t it wonderful how the taste of something can ignite a long-buried memory like nothing else on earth? Proust really was onto something, wasn’t he? As I was making this soup, I remembered that I once cooked a version of it for my now-husband many moons ago in a cramped, freezing Montreal apartment when the snow was four inches deep outside the window and the radiators were broken. We’d landed a few days earlier from Mexico, and I remember the cold hitting me like a train. I was - as was my prerogative as a fresh faced twenty-something - wearing ankle-skimming cotton trousers and brogues with no socks and a denim jacket. We’d just spent a few weeks at the end of our time living in Vancouver (I’ll have to tell you about that some time) travelling from Nashville to Mexico’s Yucatan coast, and for some reason I’d failed to grasp quite how drastic the temperature change would be. And so I found myself on a snow-flanked pavement outside Montreal airport with a fast fading tan and chattering teeth, scraping around in my purse for the bus fare to our Air B and B.
We were at the end of months of living abroad, where I’d been writing freelance food and travel pieces, doing some work experience in a high end bakery and developing recipes for my first cookbook. Jamie had been managing the office for a small tech start up, and we had been living for the incredible Asian food and craft beer in Vancouver, spending every spare penny we had after paying rent for our basement room on travelling and eating. We were broke. But there was enough in the coffers to raid a nearby thrift store for a winter coat, and I found a total bargain in an oversized 80s burgundy Aquascutum cashmere number for 60 dollars which I still have and wear to this day.
The night we arrived, we decided to blow what was left of our kitty on a meal out, as we hadn’t had time to find our bearings or shop for groceries. Following our noses along the icy pavements, linking arms for warmth, we stumbled upon a bustling French brasserie with twinkling candles and paper tablecloths that ignited in us such a sudden and powerful pang for Paris - something of a regular occurrence after living in North America for six months -