It’s the end of the semester, and so we’re turning to the recipes that take more time. Some of them are spectacular dishes, like the lamb biryani we’ll make later this week, or the seafood gumbo we like to cook when New Year’s rolls around. But many of them are humbler dishes, ones that require little in the way of ingredients, but a great deal of care tending a pot, or a long slow simmer on the stove.
The recipe that taught me the value of time as an ingredient is one of those humbler dishes. Its origins are as a peasant dish, despite the fact that in North America, you’re more likely to find it in an upscale restaurant. French onion soup, in its most basic form, requires little more than onions and an afternoon.
Growing up, my dad, also a professor, cooked most of our meals. Almost everything in his repertoire could be done in half an hour. As a result, while I learned a lot about cooking from him, I never witnessed what could be done with two or more hours stirring on the stove. The first time I made french onion soup, I marveled at the onions’ slow transformation from white to jammy gold. I had never cooked an onion so long, but I followed the recipe’s directions to sweat the onions and cook them slow, being sure that they would color evenly all the way through, instead of just browning their edges as I’d done so many hasty times before.
Near the end of this semester, I attended a lecture by Teju Cole where he talked about what it means to make art. He explained it in a way that felt both simple and resonant to me: one of the greatest challenges is to create a thing–an essay, a photograph–that is worth another person’s time. “How do I get some other busy human being to slow down and give time to this?” he asked.
In the flurry of my first semester here, there were precious few occasions where I was able to slow down. I often felt like I was going through my days, and my weeks, at warp speed. We often found ourselves, at the end of a day, reading the recipe we’d planned to make, which we’d only really skimmed before. We’d find a step that we’d forgotten to account for–marinating time, or resting time, or cooling time. And then we’d look to the clock, and start making whatever cuts to the recipe we think might work, relying on tricks we’ve picked up over the years.
I’ve watched enough Chopped and cooked enough meals that I can make a meal quickly when I need to. But the real reason that I love cooking is because it forces me to move more slowly. At the end of a non-stop day of meeting with students and teachers, there’s something soothing about slicing onions. At the end of this non-stop semester, nothing sounded more centering than slicing up the entire bag of onions that’s needed to make a batch of french onion soup.
Almost everything I do is some form of making. I make lesson plans, assignments, essays, poems. In each of these, I feel the difficulty that Teju Cole describes: how can I make something that’s worth your time? How will I spend the 75 minutes of a writing class, the 60 minutes of a meeting, the 14 lines of a sonnet, or the 7500 words of a scholarly article? In the kitchen, the making feels easier, more concrete. I can labor over a meal–for minutes, or for hours, knowing that whoever I make it for will happily take the time to eat.
If you google “french onion soup recipe,” you’ll find plenty of possibilities that estimate an hour, and you might be tempted to choose those ones, because really, who has the time? But time is exactly the ingredient that they’re missing. You can find a hundred tips or tricks that are meant to speed things up, but at the end of the day, you cannot caramelize onions in less than 45 minutes. And with the volume of onions you need to caramelize for french onion soup, you really need at least an hour. Add to that the time spent slicing them, and the time spent building those richly caramelized onions up into a soup, and you can see why this is a semester’s end meal.
The french onion soup recipe that I follow most often now calls for 2h45 minutes total time. I appreciate this particular recipe, not just because of its interesting twist (adding roasted poblanos and balsamic vinegar), but because it’s honest about the time required. It describes in detail the 25 minutes spent sweating the onions, then the 40 minutes spent cooking all their water off, then the 40 minutes more spent browning them. It’s a recipe that aims to do what Teju Cole is doing too: to get some other busy human to slow down and give their time—to the transformation of onions into a golden soup.
Most recipe writers take the opposite tactic: their approach the challenge of making a recipe worth a person’s time is to ask for as little time as possible. They shorten every step, allocating 20 minutes to caramelize onions, or 2-3 minutes to brown a roux. The quickest recipes are often the ones that rise to the top of google’s ranking. On NYT cooking, you can filter recipes by the amount of time you can spare: under 45 minutes, under 30 minutes, under 20. The result is a glut of recipes that have been time-trimmed, edited down past the point of possibility, with no time for flavors to develop, or for the cook to pour themselves a glass of wine.
When we’re cooking, one of the most important adaptations we make to a recipe is to add the missing time back in. If a recipe begins with onions, or a trinity, or mirepoix, or some other sort of vegetable base, we cook it for as much time as we can possibly afford. If a recipe continues with a simmering–of a soup, or a sauce, we let the flavors marry and reduce until our hunger can’t be held off anymore. The rule crosses cuisines–from Indian curries, to Italian sauces, to French stocks and soups, to all sorts of braises, and marinades, and stews–there are very few recipes that can’t be improved with the simple addition of time. When I made this most recent batch of French onion soup, I had my laptop on the counter for a long-overdue zoom with friends who live across the country from us now. While I stirred the onions, watching their color slowly turn, we caught up on each others’ careers and lives. Slowing down improves both the result, and the time spent making it.
Recipes that are worth the time
French Onion Soup with Roasted Poblano
To make it gluten free, we substitute rice flour in the roux. We’ve taken to serving it with a gruyere grilled cheese instead of a cheesy bread lid, which works better with gf bread textures, and makes for fun dipping too.
It’s rare that we follow a recipe precisely, but we followed this one to the letter and it came out perfectly on our first try. Over the years, we haven’t come up with any worthwhile shortcuts: start a day ahead for marinating, and give yourself the 4.5 hours of cooking time.
What are your slow-down recipes? Drop a note in the comments if you’re willing to share.