Last night, while mid-way through a bowl of French Onion Soup, my favorite taster, critic and dinner companion remarked,

“I’ve eaten all kinds of French Onion Soup in my life but nothing has ever tasted this good.”

Wow, that’s some compliment, I thought.  What a massage to my Ego.

Then, the next remark, “Dorie really hit it out of the ballpark this time!”

Ohhhhhh.

Little credit, please.

What could taste better on a February evening than French Onion Soup with Sancerre.

Délicieux. Merci, Dorie.

Many amateur chefs approach making French Onion Soup, this week’s choice for French Friday with Dorie, with trepidation. What’s so difficult about throwing a few onions in a pot, adding some broth, wine and cognac and topping it with bread and cheese? As my favorite little eight-year-old, Clara Place, says, “It’s twicky, really twicky.”

Primary Ingredients: Garlic and Sweet Spanish Onions. (In 2002 this onion was named Utah’s state vegetable. Honest.)

Cut onion in half from top to bottom. Cut lengthwise, in half, again, leaving root intact. Then thinly slice crosswise.

While not prepared to give Ms. Greenspan all the credit for this marvelous recipe, it is a great opportunity to raise the cognac snifter (well, someone had to drink the leftover cognac) and toast Dorie for her beautifully clear and well-written cookbook. Dorie takes you through each recipe, explaining very succinctly and better than most, the basic steps to a successful result.

For example, regarding onion caramelization, she writes, “Have patience: depending on the heat and the onions, this may take an hour or more. And don’t be tempted to try to speed things up, because if you burn the onions, your soup will have a bitter taste. On the other hand, if you don’t get the onions really brown, your soup will be pale in both taste and looks.”

It took one-hour and twenty-minutes for my onions to reach a perfect deep caramel color. Patience is a VIrtue.

Here’s some good and bad news about french onion soup. First, the bad. Not only did the French not invent french fries, they also cannot claim the rights to onion soup. The ancient Greeks enjoyed onion soup as did the Romans. Various versions even marched onto the pages of the more modern English and colonial American cookbooks. Onions were easy to grow, cheap, nutritious and considered poor people’s food.

A littler cognac, toasted baguette slices, Gruyère (a little extra, maybe) and ready to broil.

What the French can be credited for is adding cheese and bread. If the Greeks could construct the Parthenon and the empire-building Romans could pillage and conquer, why wouldn’t they have thought of that? This delicious addition was probably left to the Canuts, the laborers who did the weaving and screening of silk that sustained Lyon’s’ most famous industry. And, that’s the reason its official name is Soupe à L’oignon à la Lyonnaise.

The ingredients are already staples in your kitchen, basically, onions and garlic, oils, chicken broth, bread and cheese (I used a smoked Gruyère).

It’s your call whether to add the wine, during cooking, and cognac, before serving. Mix in, and these are the must-include ingredients, time (who has extra time???) and, patience (not part of my DNA). The result via Dorie is perfection.

To learn more about making french onion soup, try http://whitsamusebouche.com/2011/03/31/get-ahold-of-your-sass/. How did other Dorista’s treat this all-seasons favorite? Go to http://www.frenchfridayswithdorie.com/  Do yourself a flavor favor and check out Dorie Greenspan’s “Around My French Table, more than 300 recipes from my home to yours”.