Soupe à l’oignon

Onions cooked down for the best part of an hour until they are brown and sweet, simmered in beef stock, ladled into a bowl over stale bread, covered with grated Gruyère and put under the grill until the cheese blisters: soupe à l'oignon gratinée is the dish Paris eats at the end of the night. The onion soup itself is old, a peasant and market-worker food found across France since at least the eighteenth century, and the gratinéed version with its cheese crust is associated with the all-night restaurants around Les Halles, the central market, where porters and revellers ate it at dawn until the market moved out in 1969. Several bistros there still serve it, and it remains on the menu of practically every brasserie in the country. Abroad it is usually called French onion soup, which no French menu writes.