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POTAGE (a la Colbert)
Take a quarter of a pound of carrot and a quarter of a pound of turnip, and cut them into squares, diamonds, rounds, or any other shapes of uniform size. Boil them in slightly salted water until they are done enough. Drain them, and put them into a clean stewpan, with three pints of delicately-flavoured clear soup. Let them boil a minute; then serve the soup. Send half a dozen poached eggs to table on a separate dish, or adopt the more usual method of serving the poached eggs in the tureen with the soup.
A consommé garnished with neatly cut root vegetables and poached eggs. The only technical demands are a genuinely clear broth and eggs poached to a liquid yolk.
- "Clear soup" means consomméThree pints (about 1.7 litres) of clarified stock, well seasoned and fat-free; the recipe does not say which meat, only that it be "delicately-flavoured" and clear. A cloudy stock will look wrong against the cut vegetables; strain through a cloth if you are not clarifying with egg white.
- Cut the vegetables first, then weighA quarter pound each of carrot and turnip is roughly 115 g each; the recipe does not say whether this is before or after trimming. Cutting rounds and diamonds from a whole carrot generates a good deal of waste, so start with more than the stated weight.
- Cook them separatelyTurnip cooks faster than carrot and will bleed a slightly sulphurous flavour into shared water. Boil each in salted water until just tender, refresh briefly if you are holding them, and add to the hot soup only at the end so they keep their shape.
- The eggs are the hingePoach them softly, three minutes at a bare shiver in acidulated water, and trim the ragged white before serving. A hard yolk arguably defeats the dish, the yolk being left to run into the consommé at table.
- Half a dozen eggs, six servingsThe recipe gives no yield, but one egg per person makes this a soup for six, at roughly half a pint each. Serving the eggs on a separate dish, as the first option suggests, lets guests take one or none.
- Timing on the dayPoached eggs hold well in warm water for ten minutes or so; drain them on a cloth before they go into the tureen. Everything else can be done in advance and reheated.
Dishes styled à la Colbert are traditionally named for Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister, though as with most such titles the connection is honorific rather than documented, and the naming is often said to belong to the later restaurant kitchen rather than the seventeenth-century court. In classical French practice the Colbert garnish for a clear soup is precisely this: a fine julienne or neatly cut vegetables plus a poached egg per serving. The dish asks for two things at once, the clarified consommé and the poached egg, in a combination where neither can be hidden, and the insistence on "squares, diamonds, rounds, or any other shapes of uniform size" makes the knife work of the kitchen visible.