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Leeks and Potato Soup, Maigre
Prepare and fry the leeks as in the recipe for LEEK SOUP (which see). Season them with a tea-spoonful of pepper and half a tea-spoonful of salt, and pour over them three pints of boiling water. Let them simmer for half an hour. Then put with them four large mealy potatoes, peeled and cut into slices. Boil until the potatoes are sufficiently soft to crush easily. Press the whole through a sieve, make the soup hot, add a pint of boiling milk or cream, and serve.
A plain three-ingredient soup that lives or dies on how the potato is handled. The original assumes you have already read the book's leek soup recipe, where the sliced leeks are softened in butter without browning.
- "Maigre" means meatlessA maigre soup is built on water rather than meat stock, for fast days or Lent. Nothing is missing from the ingredient list; the water is deliberate.
- Imperial measuresCassell's pints are 20 fl oz, so three pints is about 1.7 litres (a little over 7 US cups) and the pint of milk is just under 2 1/2 cups. Scale down if you want a thicker soup.
- Ease off the pepperA full teaspoon of pepper and only half a teaspoon of salt for nearly two litres of liquid is a Victorian balance. Start with a quarter teaspoon of pepper and salt to taste, seasoning again after the milk goes in.
- The hinge: sieve, do not blend hardPressing cooked potato through a sieve or a mouli-legumes breaks the cells gently. A blender or stick blender ruptures the starch and turns the soup gluey within seconds; if you use one, pulse only briefly, or mash the potato and whisk it in.
- "Mealy" potatoesFloury varieties -- russet, Maris Piper, King Edward. Four large ones is roughly 2 lb / 900 g peeled. Waxy potatoes will not crush easily and give a watery result.
- Fry the leeks gentlyThe cross-referenced leek soup recipe is not reproduced here; 'fry' in this context most likely means softening the leeks gently in fat without colouring them. Browning gives a sweet, toasted note that reads as onion soup rather than leek.
- Adding the milkHave the milk hot but bring the finished soup only to a bare steam. Boiling after the dairy is in risks scorching at the base and a grainy texture.
- YieldAbout six generous servings as a first course. Good with a little chopped chive or a spoonful of cream on top.
Leek and potato soup in this maigre form is a close relative of what French kitchens later codified as potage parmentier, and of its chilled descendant vichyssoise, though no direct line of descent can be traced. Cassell's places it among the meatless soups because some nineteenth-century British households still kept Lent and other fast days, and because water-based soups were cheap: leeks and potatoes were among the few vegetables reliably available through late winter in Britain, when the last of the stored crop and the overwintered leek bed were what remained. The instruction to press everything through a sieve is a reminder that smooth soups predate mechanical blending by centuries -- the labour was done by hand with a wooden spoon and a horsehair or wire sieve.