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Soup Bonne Femme
Wash, dry, and cut up 2 large heads of lettuce, 1 pound sorrel, and 1 pound spinach. Add 3 pints white stock, and simmer with 1/2 cup Crisco, 2 carrots, and 2 onions, for 1 hour. Blend together 2 tablespoons Crisco, 4 tablespoons flour, and yolks of 2 eggs, thin with 1 cup of boiling milk, and add to broth. Season with salt and pepper, press through sieve, and serve with croutons.
A green purée soup from a Crisco promotional cookbook, thickened twice over — first with a flour roux, then with egg yolks. The yolks are the part that needs attention.
- Keep the yolks below a simmerOnce the egg-and-flour mixture goes into the broth, hold the pot at 170-180F and stir. The flour buffers the yolks somewhat, but a rolling boil will still throw curds that no sieve will disguise.
- CriscoThe book was published to sell it, which is why shortening turns up where a French kitchen would use butter. Butter is better here for flavour the soup otherwise lacks. Use 8 tablespoons in the pot with the greens and 2 more in the flour-and-yolk mixture, or halve the pot quantity — half a cup of fat for three pints of stock is generous by current taste.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock, made from raw bones with no roasting step, so it stays pale. Unsalted chicken stock is the practical stand-in. Three pints is 6 cups.
- SorrelRarely stocked in supermarkets; look at farmers' markets in spring or grow it. Its job is acidity — if you substitute more spinach, finish the soup with lemon juice to taste, or the whole thing falls flat.
- The hour of simmeringLong by modern standards and it will dull the colour, but the soup is puréed and thickened rather than served as a bright green potage, so the loss is mostly cosmetic. Forty minutes is enough to soften the carrots and onions.
- Sieve or blender"Press through sieve" implies a sieve worked with a pestle or spoon; the book does not say which. A blender is faster; pass it through a fine strainer afterwards if you want the texture the original intended.
- YieldAbout 6 servings as a first course. Cut the croutons small and add them at the table, not in the pot.
Soupe bonne femme — literally "good woman's soup," conventionally rendered "good wife's soup" — is the French kitchen's name for a plain household potage of whatever green vegetables are at hand, usually leek and potato in the classic reading, but lettuce, sorrel and spinach in the version that came into English-language cookbooks. The sorrel is the giveaway that this belongs to an older French tradition rather than an American one: sorrel soups thickened with egg yolk were a familiar idiom in nineteenth-century French domestic cooking, where sorrel was a common kitchen-garden plant and its sharpness stood in for lemon. Its appearance here, in a book issued by Procter & Gamble to demonstrate that their new hydrogenated shortening could do anything butter or lard could do, is a small piece of marketing history: recipes with French names lent the product prestige, and the butter in them was quietly written out and Crisco written in.