Baked and breads
French onion soup
Slow-cooked onions in beef stock, topped with bread and grated cheese and browned under the grill.
French onion soup, soupe à l'oignon gratinée, is a broth of onions cooked very slowly until deep brown, simmered in stock and finished in the bowl with a slice of toasted bread and a thick layer of grated cheese. The top is grilled until it bubbles and blisters. It was long the late-night food of the Paris market quarter.
What goes in
- Gruyère or Comté417%, The grilled crust.
- Onions833%, Cooked slowly until brown.
- Beef stock729%, Or a mix of stocks.
- Baguette313%, Toasted slices.
- Butter14%, For the onions.
- White wine14%, Deglazes the pan.
Rough parts by weight. The ring shows each ingredient's share of the dish.
Made step by step
Each drawing shows the operation for that step. Quantities and timings differ from house to house; this is one traditional way, in outline.
Step 1: Fry Cook sliced onions in butter over low heat for a long time until deep golden brown. Step 2: Simmer Deglaze with wine, add stock and simmer until the flavours join. Step 3: Bake Toast slices of baguette. Step 4: Layer Ladle the soup into ovenproof bowls and float a toast in each. Step 5: Grate Cover thickly with grated cheese. Step 6: Bake Grill until the cheese bubbles and browns, then serve at once. Finished French onion soup, by share.
Les Halles at night
Onion soups are old and widespread, since onions were cheap and kept well. The gratinée became famous in Les Halles, the great central market of Paris, where porters, market traders and late diners ate it through the night. When the market moved out of central Paris in 1971, the soup stayed on the menus of bistros nearby and spread through French restaurants worldwide.
The cheese crust
The soup itself contains no cheese. The cheese goes on top: Gruyère, Comté or Emmental, grated and piled over a slice of toasted baguette floating in the bowl. Under a hot grill it melts and browns, sealing the soup underneath. Eating it means breaking through the crust and pulling up long strings of cheese, which is part of the pleasure.
Where it is used
The cheeses in it
More on EveryCheese
No cheeses here yet. New pages are added every day.
Sources and further reading
Original text and drawings by the EveryCheese desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. The shares are a rough, illustrative ratio, not a recipe: every family and kitchen makes it differently. If we have something wrong, tell us.
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Emmental: Coyau, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Gruyère: Rolf Krahl ( Rotkraut ), CC BY 4.0, source
- Comté: Myrabella, CC BY-SA 3.0, source