• 5-6 cups yellow onions, thinly sliced (1 1/2 to 2 lbs)
• 1 tablespoon cooking oil
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1/2 teaspoon sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 3 tablespoons flour
• 6 cups beef stock (preferably homemade)
• 1 cup wine (dry red or white)
• 1 bay leaf
• 1/2 teaspoon ground sage
• salt and pepper
• 12 ounces swiss cheese, grated
• 4 ounces parmesan cheese, grated
• 1/2 raw yellow onion
• 2-3 tablespoons cognac
• 8 slices French bread (about 1 inch thick)
• 4 tablespoons olive oil, for drizzling

Soupe a’ l’Oignon.  Not just any Soupe a’ l’Oignon, but the Soupe a’ l’Oignon de Julia Child, venerated chef (goddess!) of all things traditional and French.  Not a woman to shy away from the kind of ingredients we are warned against but make things taste so good.  She doesn’t offer much in the way of vegetarian cooking but you gotta respect that the woman had no fear of butter.

We don’t fear the butter since it falls under the ‘lacto’ part of the ‘lacto-ovo’ prefix that we add to ‘vegetarian.’  (We’ll include that in a future ‘guilt’ post no doubt, but today we’re talking about broth, not butter.)  It is the broth we fear. We are Fearers of the Broth!  Not the kind of fear that causes one to run screaming into the night, but the kind of I-don’t-wanna-know-what-I’m-eating fear.  Don’t ask, don’t tell.

I used to ask servers and for a time would only order soup at the Queen Mother because they never seemed to mind my asking, and they often made it with a vegetable or tomato base.  The first time I tried carrot/orange soup was at the Queen Mum and I still remember how flavourful and rich it was.  And smooth – it was like butter!  It had a touch of ginger in it too, not too much but just right.  Mmm, warm memories of my purer vegetarian past.  Not like now.

Kaplansky’s on College Street.  Don’t ask why on earth we were at Kaplansky’s, a restaurant that celebrates meat with a vigour that can only be matched by the House of Chan or Lindy’s.  At least the borscht at Future’s has the decency to be the colour of beets but not at Kaplansky’s.  It wasn’t even purple but a vaguely brownish liquid with chunks of beef encircling our spoons like beef sharks.  We pretended not to notice them but they were everywhere, mocking our lack of conviction.  It was at that moment that I realized that we’d crossed another threshold from the ‘I don’t want to know’ to the ‘this is so obviously beef broth – what’s wrong with you?’  Egads.

It’s come to this.  We are at the proverbial crossroads and we want French Onion Soup.  We love it and covet it.  We try to convince ourselves that the broth is made only from caramelized onions but we know better.  So, what to do?  Why, experiment of course!  We’re going to make Julia Child’s traditional Onion Soup, and we’re going to try to match its inevitable deliciousness with our own vegetarian version, one that even Julia would be proud of.  We’ll even test it on others (insert evil laughter here), and get back to you on that.

Stay tuned!

We credit Anita de la Costa for her interpretation of the recipe from Julia Child’s The French Chef show