My Father's French Onion Soup

Postwar Paris had a lifelong influence on James Edisto Mitchell—both as an artist and a cook BY Shane Mitchell

- Shane Mitchell

MY FATHER GAVE ME HIS LETTERS FROM PARIS.

Written with a fountain pen on onionskin stationary and folded in envelopes marked Par Avion, these formative accounts were addressed to my grandmother, and mailed during the year he studied art in Montparnasse. He was 25 then and freshly disembarked from a World War II merchant marine ship. Dad asked Nana to ship pipe tobacco and instant coffee from the States because the French stuff was “too expensive” and “undrinkable.” He spent Sundays at museums. Bought a radio instead of paying his rent. Got engaged to someone else before meeting my mother. Ate a lot of soup when dead broke.

The school my father attended, Académie de la Grand Chaumière, was anything but grand. A modest townhouse with open studios, the academy would become known for its affiliation with modernists Amedeo Modigliani, Alberto Giacometti, and Louise Bourgeois. A few doors down on the same street, his poorly heated hotel also boasted an artistic pedigree. Samuel Beckett and F. Scott Fitzgerald both lived there for a time. In 1950, Dad paid $15 a month to rent a room with a hot plate so he could cook a can of beans or heat up water for cocoa. He purchased paints and brushes from the noted art supplier Sennelier, on Quai Voltaire, and met his closest friends, two other young American artists, at Le Select on Boulevard Montparnasse whenever one of them had enough money to treat the others. On March 11, he wrote: “My eating out at dinnertime in the evening costs about 160 to 200 francs each night. That amounts to about 60 cents at the most. To save money, I eat lunch in my room. Lunch consists of a half loaf of huge-sized French bread (delicious too!), ham, cheese, sardines once in a while, an orange, and tea or coffee.”

French Onion Soup

SERVES 6 • Total: 4 hr. 50 min.