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POTATO SOUP (a la Creme)
Take about twenty large-sized potatoes; cleanse, peel, wash, and cut them in pieces. Put them into a stewpan with one large onion and one head of celery also sliced up. Add four ounces of fresh butter, a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Set the pan on a slow fire, let the contents simmer, stirring occasionally, till they are nearly reduced to a sort of puree. Add three pints of good white consomm, then let the potatoes boil gently by the side of a moderate fire for half an hour, pass them through the tamis, and after having removed the puree into a soup-pot, add, if required, a little more consomm to it, and set it on the fire to boil gently by the side of the stove, in order to clarify it in the usual way required for other purees of vegetables. Just before serving add a pint of boiling cream, a pat of fresh butter, and a little pounded sugar.
A Victorian purée soup built on the sweating of potato, onion and celery in butter before any liquid goes in. The instructions are for a household or hotel kitchen, so the quantities are large and the vessels are named rather than measured.
- The hinge: never let it brownThe whole character of the soup comes from the slow butter stew at the start, which should soften the vegetables without colouring them. A slow fire means the lowest workable heat and a lid on; if the butter starts to fry, the finished soup tastes of roast potato rather than cream.
- Scale of the recipeTwenty large potatoes is perhaps 8 to 10 lb, and with 3 pints of stock and a pint of cream the yield runs to several quarts, enough for a dozen or more servings. Quartering the whole recipe gives a sensible domestic pot.
- ConsommeRead this as a good unsalted or lightly salted white stock -- veal or chicken, pale and unroasted. Modern consomme is clarified with egg white and is wasted here; a clear light stock is all the dish needs.
- Butter and creamFour ounces of fresh butter is one US stick. A pint of cream at the end is an imperial pint, 20 fl oz or about 2 1/2 US cups; "boiling" means scalded and hot, so that it does not chill the soup as it goes in.
- TamisA tamis is a drum sieve of woven cloth or fine mesh, worked with a wooden mushroom. A food mill or a ladle pressed through a fine sieve does the same job. Do not use a blender or food processor -- high-speed blades turn potato starch gluey.
- ClarifyFor a vegetable puree this does not mean egg-white clarification. It means holding the pot at a bare simmer at the side of the heat and skimming the scum and butterfat that rise, so the surface finishes clean.
- Fire positions"By the side of a moderate fire" and "by the side of the stove" both describe indirect, gentle heat on a coal range. On a modern hob that is the lowest setting, or a heat diffuser; the soup should barely move.
- Sugar and nutmegA little pounded sugar means a pinch of caster or superfine sugar, used to round the celery rather than to sweeten. Grate the nutmeg fresh and keep it to a few strokes; it dominates a mild potato base very quickly.
Potato purees of this kind belong to the nineteenth-century French repertoire that English cookery books absorbed wholesale, and the vocabulary here -- consomme, tamis, puree, working at the side of the fire -- is lifted straight from professional kitchen practice of the sort associated with Ude, Soyer and Francatelli, all of whom cooked in London. The dish is close to what later menus call potage Parmentier, named for Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the eighteenth-century agronomist generally credited with persuading the French that the potato was fit for human food rather than fodder. The recipe itself gestures beyond the potato, noting that the same treatment -- the vegetable puree finished with cream -- suits turnip, carrot or green pea alike. That it calls for four ounces of butter, three pints of stock and a full pint of cream to serve a table signals the kind of household the book addressed, one with a range kept in at all hours and a cook with a tamis and the arm to use it.