SOUPE a L'OIGNON

Katrina & I were in Paris for the new millennium. Supper started late, as is usual, and I was more than wobbly from sweet vermouth cocktails, countless Kronenbourg, a few nips of single malt.

The table was lengthened with leaves and seemed to fill the entire apartment. It was like one of those surreal short stories by Calvino or Perec. Everyone was smoking. I took a good beating from other grad students for claiming Plato as my favorite philosopher. To make matters worse, I even began to vociferously defend his system(s) and quote liberally from Sophist, Parmenides, Gorgias. Enough of your Derrida, your Blanchot! Bah... Wine was literally raining from the ceiling. Rescue boats were dispatched. And then the cordials came out.

We talked about walking to Les Halles for onion soup. The Belly of Paris. We should have. The sun was up and I was still babbling about Pythagorean notions of soul as harmony of the body. The French are more forgiving than Westerners make them out to be.

Drink through your hangover, they said. I complied. And I made my first onion soup upon returning home.

Recipes, like everything else, change over time. The constants are the onions, the butter, the flour, the cheese. I've made the soup with veal and lamb stock. I've made it with chicken stock, with beef stock, with weak pork stock whipped up from neck bones and trotters. I like brown chicken stock best and extending it with red wine sharpens it it in ways lemon juice or vinegar simply fail to do. A thick, crusty crouton is a must, too.