The Old School Soup You Need To Make On Repeat This Fall

If there's one bowl of soup that feels like slipping under warm covers while the weather turns cold outside, it's an old fashioned, no-frills, onion and bread soup. With just four ingredients — onions, butter, bread, and broth — this isn't your fancy fine dining affair, and it requires no caramelization and no blender to pull it off. In fact, all it takes is throwing those simple ingredients into a slow cooker and letting that do the work for a good few hours.

The only hard part here is patience because you can't rush onions if you want them to transform from sharp to sweet. You do have to do a lot of chopping, but Anthony Bourdain has advice on how to safely chop onions, which is worth following. The butter is added first to tenderize the onions and release their flavor before the broth and bread are added. All of these ingredients heat together for at least four hours on a high slow cooker setting, and the bread will thicken the onion-infused broth. Like many recipes, homemade is better, and that goes for chicken broth if you can manage it. Remember that the ratio you need for perfect homemade chicken stock makes all the difference in its flavor.

Soup recipes on the internet can sometimes be a bit intimidating, with all their searing, deglazing, and blending. While this four-ingredient soup starts with a quick sauté of onions in butter right inside the slow cooker, it's still a much easier process than most. All it takes are some common kitchen staples treated with care and given the time to cook down properly.

This nostalgic onion soup is similar to an 18th-century version of French onion soup that mostly consisted of just onions, water, and croutons. While there are many versions of French onion today, these basic ingredients could be thrown together as a cheap, sustaining meal. Similar recipes exist with English onion soups using ale and Stilton, and the Italian carabaccia with Parmesan-covered toast.

This history is what makes this slow-cooked version so satisfying now. It revives that same scrappy spirit with a more modern twist, using simple ingredients and a hands-off simmer to coax the sweetness from the onions while the bread thickens the broth. Because it's so simple, it's the kind of recipe you can experiment with — perhaps a spoonful of mustard for tang or even a handful of lentils if you want a little protein and body. Just avoid some of the mistakes everyone makes when making soup, like skipping the fat element (the butter is essential) or neglecting to use a quality stock.