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SPINACH SOUP (a maigre soup)
Take chopped spinach enough to fill a large bowl, a lettuce, and two leaves of sorrel; fry them in butter until browned, put them in a saucepan with three pints of boiling water, also an onion stuck round with cloves, a very stale French roll sliced, and some blanched and shredded pistachio kernels. Let all simmer together. Beat up the yolks of eight eggs with a little wine and the juice of a lemon, and add to the broth when it is strained. Serve with a toasted French roll in the centre of the dish, and garnish with poached egg and scalded spinach.
A thickened green soup in the older French manner, where stale bread does the body-building and egg yolks finish it. The whole dish turns on how the yolks go in.
- The hinge: the egg liaisonEight yolks beaten with wine and lemon will scramble instantly if poured into simmering broth. Take the strained broth off the heat, whisk a ladleful into the yolks to temper them, return the mixture to the pan and hold it below a simmer (around 170-180F) until it coats a spoon.
- Three pintsImperial measure, so 60 fl oz, about 1.7 litres. With eight yolks and a whole roll going in, expect the finished soup to be thick and to serve six generously.
- A very stale French rollThis is the thickener, not a garnish. A dense day-old baguette or country loaf works; modern soft supermarket rolls dissolve into paste. Slice and dry it in a low oven if it is not properly stale.
- SorrelTwo leaves is a seasoning, not a vegetable — sorrel is sharply acidic and easy to overdo. If you cannot find it, a little extra lemon juice covers the same ground, though not the flavour.
- Frying the greens until brownedSpinach and lettuce will not brown so much as collapse and then catch. Cook them in the butter over decent heat until the water has driven off and the edges begin to colour; stop there, since scorched spinach turns the soup bitter and grey.
- Pistachio kernelsBlanched means skinned: pour boiling water over shelled pistachios, stand a minute, then rub off the papery skins so the green shows. They are there for colour and richness as much as texture.
- The wineUnspecified in the original; a dry white is the sensible reading for a maigre soup. A couple of tablespoons is enough to loosen the yolks.
- StrainingThe instruction may mean the solids were pressed through, though straining at this period could equally mean simply removing them to leave a clear broth. If you want the greens in the soup, a food mill or a brief blitz with a stick blender before sieving gives a smoother result than pushing it through by hand.
Maigre is French for lean, and a maigre soup is one made without meat or meat stock, for the fast days of the church calendar — Fridays, Lent, the eves of feasts. English cookery books carried these recipes right through the nineteenth century, and they were also simply useful cheap dishes. The construction here is older than the book: greens sweated in butter, stale bread for body, and a liaison of egg yolks sharpened with lemon and wine, a technique found in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French practice; a similar yolk-and-acid finish underlies avgolemono. The pistachios reflect an earlier taste for nuts in savoury cookery, and the extravagance of eight yolks suggests that a fast-day soup in a well-off household meant abstaining from flesh, not from luxury.