We were having dad’s fish au gratin, which didn’t sound French at all in my dad’s broad Yorkshire accent. More like a glottal fish-o-gra-’an. Oh but I loved it. Fish topped with onions and braised in a pan until they were sweetly caramelised, then spooned onto fillets of almost-done pan-fried white fish and smothered in his cheese sauce, and popped under the grill to turn it a golden, gooey, molten brown.
But, for me, French onion soup is the ultimate gratin as well as the ultimate peasant dish, a term not intended to denigrate the poor people for whom it was once a staple meal but to identify the dish as a part of that cuisine. Peasant cuisine, one of food’s common denominators. Though there have been onion soups in many cuisines since antiquity, and yes, the Romans had an onion soup too, it is the French onion soup that is best known, and has been particularly popular in the last 60 or so years after its heyday as a Parisian street food for the masses in its modern 18-century origins.