Home › The Principles of Cookery › Leeks, Soup Of
Leeks, Soup Of
Trim off the roots and outer leaves from eight fine leeks. Wash them quite free from grit, divide them lengthwise into quarters, and cut them into pieces an inch long. Put these into boiling water for five minutes, then drain them, and fry them in a little hot butter till they are lightly browned. Pour over them two quarts of good stock, season with two tea-spoonfuls of salt and half a tea-spoonful of pepper, and simmer gently for an hour. Place a roll cut into small pieces at the bottom of the tureen. Thicken the soup with three ounces of flour, first mixed smoothly with a little stock, and afterwards added to the rest. Boil a quarter of an hour longer, and serve as hot as possible. If preferred, half a pint of cream can be substituted for the sliced roll. Probable cost, 5d. per quart. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A straightforward leek soup, thickened with flour and bulked out with bread — the sort of everyday tureen cookery Cassell's aimed at. A few conversions and one technique note are all it needs.
- Washing the leeksGrit sits between the layers. The recipe as written washes the leeks before quartering them; in practice it is easier to split them lengthwise first, then rinse under running water, fanning the layers apart, since leeks rinsed whole can still hold sand.
- Two quarts of stockIn imperial measure that is about 2.3 litres (roughly 9 to 10 US cups). "Good stock" here would be a meat or veal broth; a light chicken stock is the nearest modern equivalent. If your stock is already salted, taste before adding the full two teaspoons.
- Three ounces of flourAbout 3/4 cup, which is a heavy hand by current taste and will give a thick, almost velouté texture. Two ounces (scant 1/2 cup) makes a soup most people would rather eat. Slake it with cold or barely warm stock, not hot, or it will lump.
- The final quarter-hour boilThis is not padding — raw flour tastes of paste, and the soup needs that time at a simmer to lose it. Stir the base often once thickened, as flour catches on the bottom of the pan.
- "A roll cut into small pieces"A bread roll, torn or diced and laid in the tureen so the hot soup softens it. The recipe does not specify the kind. Toasted or fried croutons are the modern reading and hold their texture better.
- The cream alternativeHalf an imperial pint is 10 fl oz / about 285 ml. The recipe offers it as a substitute for the sliced roll, not an extra; adding it at the end, off the heat, is the safest modern handling.
- BlendingThe original serves the leeks in pieces. The soup will also purée into something close to a modern potage if you prefer, using a stick blender before any cream goes in.
- YieldSix to eight persons, as stated; nearer four if it is the main part of a meal.
Leeks are among the oldest cultivated alliums in Europe and were a staple of the poor long before they were a fashionable garnish, valued because they stand in the ground through winter when little else does. Cassell's gives the "probable cost, 5d. per quart" for a reason: the dictionary was written for households running to a budget, and a costed soup that fed eight for a few pence a head earned its place in the book. The technique here — blanching, then frying the vegetable in butter before the stock goes in — is a method often met with in nineteenth-century cookery for coaxing sweetness out of an allium without letting it catch, and the bread laid in the bottom of the tureen is older still, a survival of the medieval sop that is traditionally said to have given "soup" its name.