One of the first "gourmet" dishes I ever recall eating is French onion soup. It was in the late '60s, in an establishment that in those days we referred to as a "fancy French restaurant." I remember the menu was written in elaborate French script, and to my second-year French student eyes, the words "Soupe a l'Oignon Gratinee" appeared to hold the promise of untold exotic culinary riches.

Imagine my surprise when, after ordering the soup in my best halting French, I learned that it was constructed almost entirely of four ingredients I'd been eating all my life: onion, beef, cheese and bread. And imagine my delight in discovering that these four quintessentially familiar flavors could be reassembled in a way as to be entirely new, at once ethereal and rustic. It is no exaggeration that the experience was a seminal influence on my understanding of what constitutes culinary excellence.

In the four decades since, I've tried to reproduce that experience many times in many restaurants, with little success. Seems there aren't many chefs these days who are willing to devote the necessary time and energy to a dish that doesn't showcase their creative talents, and whose humble ingredients can't justify a fat profit margin.

Fortunately, I've found one who is: Aaron Whittington at Saint-Jacques, a casually romantic French restaurant in North Raleigh. Whittington's classic time-consuming recipe starts with mountains of onions sauteed in butter to caramelized sweetness. These are then deglazed with white burgundy wine and suspended in a house-made veal stock that has simmered for hours to extract every iota of beef flavor from flesh, bone and marrow. Salt, pepper and a pinch of herbes de Provence are all that are necessary to round out the flavor.

When a customer orders the soup, Whittington ladles a generous measure into a rough brown earthenware crock, followed by a crouton cut from a crusty baguette. He seals the top with gruyere and runs it under the broiler until the cheese is blistered and bubbly. The result is certainly not what you'd call "fancy" -- but it has never yet failed to live up to my fond 40-year-old memory.

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