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MEAGRE SOUP (Soupe Maigre)
Before beginning, wash thoroughly all your green vegetables, peel your roots, and throw them into cold water. The proportions of each must depend very much upon what you can get. The soup, when finished, should be of the thickness of ordinary pea-soup. Take five or six handfuls of common sorrel, two large lettuces from which the withered leaves only have been removed, a small bunch of chervil, and two or three sprigs of parsley. Shred all these very fine. Slice and chop onions, carrots, and leeks very fine. Fry the vegetables till lightly browned in butter, put them into a saucepan with boiling water, and add a bay-leaf, a sprig of thyme, and a good lump of butter. Season with pepper and salt. Stir from time to time to prevent any of the ingredients from sticking to the bottom. When they are thoroughly cooked, press the vegetables through a sieve. If necessary, add more water to the pulp, and boil the soup again before serving. The soup may be further thickened either with bread or boiled potatoes--steeped in a little of the liquor, and then broken up and mixed with the soup.
A vegetable purée built on sorrel, with no stock at all — the flavour comes entirely from browning the vegetables in butter first, so that step is the hinge. Rush it and the soup tastes of hot water.
- Quantities are deliberately looseThe recipe says the proportions "must depend very much upon what you can get," and it means it. It specifies no weights, no water quantity and no variety of lettuce; the only guide it offers is that the finished soup should be "of the thickness of ordinary pea-soup," and that more water can be added to the pulp at the end. Any figures a modern cook works to are guesswork, not the book's.
- Sorrel is the pointSorrel supplies all the acidity in a soup with no stock, wine or lemon. It is sold in spring and early summer at farmers' markets and in some Middle Eastern and Eastern European shops. Spinach is not a substitute on its own; if you use it, the soup needs a good squeeze of lemon at the end.
- Cook the acid in a non-reactive panSorrel and its oxalic acid will pick up a metallic taste from bare aluminium or unlined cast iron. Use stainless steel or enamelled cast iron. Sorrel also turns from green to olive-drab within a minute of heating, which is normal and unavoidable.
- ChervilRarely stocked in supermarkets and it wilts fast. If none is available, use a smaller amount of tarragon plus extra parsley rather than doubling the parsley, which will not give the anise note.
- Browning, then boiling waterThe recipe frys the vegetables in butter until "lightly browned" before the boiling water goes in; it does not say whether the shredded greens go into the pan with the roots or later. That browning, plus the butter, is most of the depth of flavour on offer. Adding boiling rather than cold water keeps the pan from stalling. No timing is given: cook until the roots are thoroughly soft.
- Sieve or blenderPressing through a sieve gives the silkiest result and removes carrot and leek fibre. A blender is faster but leaves the soup grainier; pass it through a sieve afterwards if you want the original texture.
- ThickeningThe bread option is a panade: soak stale white crumb in a ladle of the hot liquor, mash smooth, then whisk in. Boiled potato does the same job but goes gluey if blended, so mash it separately and stir it through.
- Yield and servingThe recipe states no yield or number of servings. Cream, a further knob of butter off the heat, or serving it cold are modern additions, not in the original.
Maigre means lean, and in French cookery it is a technical term rather than a description of calories: a plat maigre is one permitted on the fast days of the Church calendar, when meat and meat broth were forbidden. Soupe maigre is therefore the everyday Lenten and Friday soup, thickened with bread or potato because there is no stock to give it body, and sharpened with sorrel because there is no wine or vinegar in it either. It teaches the general method — sweat and brown, moisten, cook, sieve — that underlies all vegetable purées. Cookbooks picked the phrase up wholesale and often used "soup maigre" simply to mean a meatless vegetable soup, the fasting sense having quietly dropped away.