why french onion soup will always make me cry

Everyone hates chopping onions. Everyone hates that aggressive feeling of the allium odour shooting arrows at your helpless senses. The hot tears welling up in the corners of your eyes and spilling out like an overflowing pan abandoned in a sink.

When I first started working in the kitchen, I became familiar with this sensation. It was my first or second week; I was given a pile of crates stacked taller than me full of onions and shallots to process for chilli crisp and pickled shallots. I stood on top of a crate, feeling foolish. I was too short and had to reach to put the shallots into the robo coupe, but my arm got tired and sore, so I bit my embarrassment and chose to use my available resources to my advantage.

“How’s the weather up there?” laughed my co-worker with an Italian accent so thick anyone would struggle to believe he wasn’t an impersonator.

I was chained to the robo coupe for what felt like an eternity. My eyes stung, my nose implored me to stop. At some point, the tears stopped lamenting the onions and started to slip into my mouth, tasting of bittersweet, salty yearning for what once was, and is no more. I was introduced to the world of kitchens by someone who isn’t in my life anymore. When I chop chives, chiffonade parsley, or brunoise ginger, my knife swings with a motion taught by a gone-but-not-forgotten tutor. My tutor inhabits my recollection from time to time, and the smell of onions will always make the taste of my tears remind me of him.

When I chop onions, I escape to a recent past that sparkles in my memory. I was only a year younger then, yet she seems so young and naïve to me now. My chef tutor and I bounced around the streets of Paris indulging only in gastronomic experiences that tasted of hedonism and young love. In the pale early mornings we would break buttery pastries, golden crumbs all over our wool coats. We’d wash them down with foamy coffees that warmed our cold fingers so we could hold hands again. We even tried a chocolat chaud so thick it would make you question your year 7 physics knowledge of the difference between liquids and solids. We’d snack on cheese and olives and bread, saving our appetites for the grandiose dinner we’d planned. Then in the evenings we’d drink a Bordeaux that we’d bought in the supermarket: peppery and velvety like a kiss with a lover from time ago. Lightheaded and giddy with rumbling tummies we’d head out for dinner, and this was where I met my true love. You see, I thought I’d travelled to Paris with my true love. I was actually mistaken. I travelled to Paris to meet my true love. French Onion Soup.

No words I put on a page will describe the beauty that it is to experience your first mouthful of French Onion Soup on an empty stomach in Paris. I could tell you how sweet the onions smell, how they melt on your tongue like some sort of caramel chutney. I could conjure up my most impressive vocabulary to describe the way the bread would soak up the liquid and the cheese would cling to the bowl with the elastic potency of a child clinging to its mother. I wouldn’t do it justice. The great tragedy of that day is that I’ll never live it again.

When we were back in London, my chef tutor taught me to make French Onion Soup. My cheeks became wet with tears, and he gently wiped them away, telling me a joke to soothe the onion-induced sorrow. We played Simon and Garfunkel on the speaker and the melodies danced with the sweet smells of onions melting into butter — from my pan, through the window of my top flat, and throughout Hampstead. It took us most of the day, and in the evening we reaped the fruits of our labour, eating more than a decently sized portion and sipping on icy, almost hostile white vermouth. I felt content, satisfied. My stomach was full and I felt educated. I had a notebook next to me with scribbled rough measurements and techniques. But I’d learned a lot more than how to make French Onion Soup. I had uncovered the art of gastronomy, the beauty of cuisine. The soup we made together tasted somehow better than the one we’d eaten in Paris, even though we used chicken stock instead of beef, and we could have reduced our onions for longer. What makes French Onion Soup taste so good is the hours of labour on your feet, wiping away salty tears as your knife rocks up and down, up and down. This understanding is fundamental to the love and appreciation of the craft. It’s why I subject myself to 16-hour shifts, leaving with aching feet, scarred arms, and a questionable smell.

If you want to eat really good French Onion Soup that tastes like reward, you’ll have to get through the labour of chopping onions. Forget that you can buy pre-chopped packaged onions at Aldi, that’s bullshit. Do your time at the kitchen counter with stinging senses. It will teach you a thing or two about life too. I now cook alone, no chef tutor by my side. If that makes me sad now, it’s only because I was lucky enough to have had such a teacher in the first place. And how lucky am I to now have the recipe to French Onion Soup in my own notebook of recipes. To love is to labour, and to labour is to lament. No French Onion soup without tears.