Julia Child's Tip For Making Store-Bought French Onion Soup Seem Homemade

Julia Child is best known for her decadent French cooking, which she approached with a can-do, unpretentious attitude. Throughout her career, Child offered easy kitchen tips to elevate the simplest of meals with her cookbooks and television cooking shows — making every home cook feel like a five-star chef. With soup season around the corner, now is the perfect time to highlight her advice on disguising a store-bought French onion soup as a homemade dish.

While there are onion mistakes you can make when making French onion soup, the dish is quite simple on paper as it is mainly composed of beef broth, thinly sliced yellow onions, bread or croutons, and a mixture of cheeses. But not everybody has the time to properly simmer the stock or prepare the fresh ingredients. For those who find themselves in this situation, the renowned chef taught viewers how to doctor up canned or packaged French onion soup to optimize the rich, savory flavors in a 1963 episode of her cooking show, "The French Chef." Child suggested adding a poached egg to bring the dish to the next level and "make it seem as though it was your very own soup that you had made from scratch."

"One thing that's a very French method is ... to poach an egg and put it on a round of toast and then pour the soup over it," Child explained. According to Child, this hack created a sort of French peasant-type soup.

Store-bought French onion soup can have an undesirable taste for a variety of reasons. The ingredients aren't fresh, the recipe can be too salty, and there can be too much broth, which results in a watery texture. To make the canned or packaged soup more appealing, Child added the toast to a bowl and topped it with the poached egg before pouring the soup on top. She then added the soup's signature cheese. The chef preferred a blend of Parmesan and Swiss, but other recipes use Gruyère or Comté cheese.

Child suggested using fresh eggs to ensure a more attractive and consistent look while poaching. When using an egg that's not as fresh, the white part tends to disperse after being added to the boiling water which can result in an overcooked and messy yolk. The cooking method involves cracking open an egg in a pan of boiling water with vinegar and removing it once the yolk and whites are set. Once removed from the pan, the poached egg is dropped in a bowl of cold water to stop the cooking process and rinse off the vinegar taste. Not only is the poached egg a tasty addition to the soup, but Child said it also makes the dish more of a main course rather than a side dish.

Not everybody enjoys the taste of poached eggs, and some may be uninterested in adding it to their soup. Thankfully, Child gave a few more suggestions on how to bring out the flavors in a store-bought French onion soup. She suggested adding alcohol like vermouth, red wine, cognac, or brandy to the soup during the heating process. These types of alcohol bring different elements to the dish, such as a richer color and a district flavor to balance out any sweetness.

According to Food.com, Child's go-to recipe for homemade French onion soup includes a hearty portion of dry white wine or dry vermouth and a few tablespoons of cognac. Although, in the video, she didn't hold back on adding more of the other varieties.

Additional ways to elevate the dish include drizzling oil or butter on top of the toast-and-cheese topping to add flavor and crisp the top during the browning process. The chef also suggested grating raw onion into the dish to get a stronger onion taste and adding slivered cheese to the soup portion to get a photo-worthy cheese pull.