Hungarian Onion Soup

Sorry this is being posted late! Events ran away from me towards the end of last week.

As promised, another soup, and one you could conjure from store cupboard ingredients, (if you own a store cupboard, I took these items from my spice shelf, carb-drawer and the fruit bowl).  I’m interested to see if it’s edible exactly as written or if these seven ingredients actually don’t magickallye combine into a tasty meal.(This recipe is from Florence Greenberg’s Jewish Cookery Book, 6th edition, 1958).

Recipe
Two Spanish Onions
Margarine 2oz
Paprika pepper  1 teaspoonful
Stock 3 pints
Two tomatoes
Noodles or vermicelli
Salt and pepper

Peel and thinly slice the onions and cook gently in the margarine (or cooking fat) [or butter or any other kind of fat or oil you like] until golden brown, stir in the paprika, add the cut-up tomatoes and pour over the stock. Bring to the boil and cook gently for half an hour;  then rub through a sieve and return to a saucepan, bring to the boil and add a little vermicelli or noodles and simmer for another fifteen minutes.

Notes

• 3 pints is a lot of liquid so I left the soup simmer without the lid.
• The sieving was quite a faff.
• I didn’t have any noodles and only had rice vermicelli, which seemed wrong, so used some thin tubular pasta instead.

Results

This is basically stone soup (without the communitarianism) – boring and slightly too sour. It would be OK as is, if eaten with lots of cheese on toast or perhaps as a starter to a very un-acidic main course.  Otherwise it needs some or all of the following: beans, sweetcorn, peas, courgettes, green beans, carrots, bacon, spinach…

Unsuperbly-souped by Elly