Be prepared to wait: how to make French onion soup like the French

Let me be clear: this week’s recipe is not a speedy little number. You can’t knock up a French onion soup for a quick supper. It’s not a 15-minute meal, or a roasting tray phenomenon that won’t require your input during its cooking. Just softening onions, despite what a lot of recipes tell you, takes up to 20 minutes in a pan. Caramelising them – really, truly caramelising them, bringing out their sweetness and complexity – takes literally hours. French onion soup is a labour of love.

But if I lowball the cooking time, one of two things will happen: you won’t end up with the soup you signed up for, the soup you deserve; or you’ll have to ignore my timings, and never trust me again.

If you are familiar with my columns, you will know that I am a dreadful combination of lazy, impatient and greedy – so something has to be seriously worthwhile if it’s going to take up my time. And I certainly don’t think that hours spent in the kitchen is an indicator of the strength or deliciousness of the product. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, not the time spent slogging away at a stove.

But French onion soup is an outlier: shortcuts simply don’t work here. Less cooking time will result in an insipid flavour. Adding bicarbonate of soda will break down the onions faster, but also means you get onion sludge (about as delicious as it sounds) – and an insipid flavour. Sugar will help the onions caramelise faster, but they don’t need it, and ultimately it will overwhelm the natural sweetness they give up during cooking.

Here, the time you devote to cooking the onions really is directly proportional to the pleasure that will result.