The spirit of cookery

But when meat savour is impossible, or is intentionally withheld, the craving for taste has to be satisfied by strong vegetable flavour, and the acceptable substance selected to that end is the onion. Hence those strongly-flavoured meals which surround men with a tainted atmosphere, and cause them to be avoided by sensitive persons. We have known a whole suite of most ONION SOUPS aesthetically pure rooms, the drawing-room being scented by a bed of natural flowers, literally penetrated for a whole evening with the capacious exhalations of a single guest who had made his mid-day meal on a collation of unmitigated coarseness. Such feeding is only fit for persons who remain in quarantine or the open air, and its results should not be inflicted upon aesthetical noses. No person of taste puts onions in substance into his omelette, but merely allows the fat to be scented by the immersion for a short time of a portion of the bulb in its fusion ; every good cook knows how to remove the coarse effect from onions by edulcoration with water, or boiling in water, or baking, and these precautions ought to become a magiric law, an unavoidable prescription of good taste, a canon to be taught in every lesson of elementary cookery. The soups and vegetable dishes consisting mainly of onions should be mitigated so as to be adapted to polite intercourse, and fall into the rank of civilized cookery, be it me gras or ato maigre, for days of rejoicing or of abstinence. In accordance with these principles, we will now consider the principal varieties of soups of which onions form the characteristic ingredient. General Observations on Onion Soups. Onion sotqjs are of various kinds, and differ either by the kind of onion employed in their preparation, such as the large mild Spanish, the medium-sized ordinary French or English, or the little ivhite, or by the manner in which the onions are treated, involving frying in fat without the production of colour, while the specific oil is dissipated ; or frying to brown colour, whereby a new flavour is created ; parboiling or boiling in broth or water •, or by the presence or absence of broths and meat-extracts, so as to be au gras or au maigre ; and by various subordinate features, such as the presence of milk or cream, and of fried or gratinated 15S breadcrusts. In France onion soups, and, as a sequence, sauces and ragouts, not rarely pass by the name of h la Souhise, and of this manner a white and a brown variety are generally distinguished. On account of the strong and aromatic taste of fried onion, it is a favourite material with which to prepare soups for fast-days, so-called potages maigres, and this accounts for the existence of a great number of recipes in literature. The following are typical examples : White Onion Soicp au Gras. — This soup is made with 'Spanish onions gently fried in butter, first by themselves, then with flour, so as to form a roux, or thickening material ; the body of the liquid should be standard broth. Bread in any of the various forms above described may be added to it in the tureen ; some grated cheese, Gruyere or Parmesan, may be handed round with it ; the cheese imparts a savour when broth is absent.