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POTAGE (a la Conde)
Soak a breakfast-cupful of red haricot beans in cold water all night. Slice an onion, put it with the beans, and boil in three pints of water for four hours. Pass the liquid through a hair sieve, and rub the beans through with a wooden spoon. Put pulp and liquid back into the saucepan, season with pepper and salt, stir till the soup boils, and serve.
A plain purée soup of red beans, thickened by nothing but the beans themselves. Two things decide whether it works: the beans must be fully soft before they are sieved, and the finished purée must be thinned to taste rather than left as the original ratio falls.
- Breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup in Victorian and Edwardian usage held roughly 8-10 fl oz, larger than a teacup. That is about 1 to 1¼ US cups of dry beans, or 8-9 oz; the measure is genuinely loose, so err on the smaller side if you want a soup rather than a purée.
- Three pintsImperial pints, so 60 fl oz or about 1.7 litres, not the 1.4 litres three US pints would give. After four hours a good deal will have evaporated.
- Red haricot beansIn British usage of the period this covers red kidney beans and similar red-skinned dried beans. The long overnight soak followed by a hard boil is exactly what dried kidney beans require; do not shorten either, and discard the soaking water.
- Four hoursLonger than modern soaked beans need. Soaked overnight, most red beans collapse in 60-90 minutes at a steady simmer, or considerably less under pressure. Cook until a bean crushes to nothing between finger and thumb, then stop.
- Hair sieve and wooden spoonThe sieving removes the skins, which is the whole point of the texture. A fine-mesh conical sieve and a ladle do the same job; a blender alone leaves the skins in and gives a grainier soup, so pass it afterwards if you want the original smoothness.
- SeasoningPepper and salt only, as written, and the soup will taste of little else. A ham bone or bacon rind in the pot, or a splash of red wine at the end, appears in fuller versions of the dish in French sources.
- YieldRoughly a litre and a half or less, depending on how much has boiled away, serving four to six as a first course. If the purée is stiffer than you want, let it down with stock or water and re-boil before serving.
Dishes labelled à la Condé in nineteenth-century French cookery are, with fair consistency, dishes built on red beans or red wine, and the name is often said to derive from the household of the Princes of Condé, the junior Bourbon line, though the derivation is traditional rather than documented. The purée of red haricots is the standard savoury example, sitting alongside the sweet riz à la Condé that used rice and apricots. Cassell's places it among the plain purée soups, where a dried pulse boiled to collapse and passed through a sieve gave a substantial course at almost no cost — the same logic behind the book's pea, lentil and haricot potages. The hair sieve it calls for was standard kitchen equipment: a wooden hoop strung with horsehair, sold in several grades of fineness, and the ordinary tool for making anything smooth before wire mesh became cheap.