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Carrot Soup
Wash and slice in thin slices one dozen half-grown carrots. Place in a saucepan with 2 tablespoonfuls of butter and a little sugar and salt. Cook slowly until the carrots begin to color. Add a pint of rich broth and boil gently to a glaze; then press the carrots through your vegetable press; return to the saucepan, and when hot, serve.
A short, concentrated carrot puree that depends entirely on the first stage: the carrots are sweated in butter with sugar until they take on colour, and that browning is where the flavour comes from. Everything after it is reduction and sieving.
- The hinge: colour before liquidCook the sliced carrots in the butter over low heat, uncovered, until the edges turn golden — 20 to 30 minutes. If you add the broth before they colour, the finished soup tastes flat and raw-sweet.
- "Half-grown carrots"Young carrots perhaps 4-5 inches long, sweeter and less woody than mature roots. A dozen of them is roughly 1 1/2 lb; slender bunch carrots or ordinary carrots cut small will stand in.
- Sugar and saltA small amount of each — about a teaspoon of sugar for the whole pan. It is there to help the carrots caramelise, not to sweeten the soup.
- "Rich broth"A meat stock with real body; the recipe does not say which. A pint is 2 cups. Because the liquid is reduced almost to nothing, any salt in a commercial stock concentrates sharply; use low-sodium and season at the end.
- "Boil gently to a glaze"Reduce until the liquid has nearly gone and coats the carrots in a syrupy film. Watch the last few minutes closely; from glaze to scorched is a short step.
- Vegetable pressA food mill or a drum sieve. A blender or food processor works and gives a smoother result, though it will not catch fibrous cores the way a sieve does.
- ConsistencyAs written this yields a stiff puree rather than a soup. Thin it back with hot broth — start with a cup — until it pours from the ladle, then reheat without boiling.
- YieldAbout 3 cups of finished soup once thinned; four small first-course servings.
Carrot puree of this kind belongs to the classical French repertoire of vegetable soups built on meat stock — the family Escoffier and his contemporaries catalogued as purées, distinguished from creams by being thickened with the vegetable itself rather than with a flour sauce. The version most often cited is Potage Crécy, named by tradition for a Crécy associated with carrots — usually given as Crécy-en-Brie, though the claim is also made for Crécy-en-Ponthieu and the attribution is not settled; the same technique was applied to turnips, peas and lentils. The instruction to reduce the broth to a glaze before sieving reflects a professional habit of concentrating flavour by evaporation, and the "vegetable press" it assumes on the bench was standard equipment before domestic blenders existed, though neither detail dates the text precisely. If it sits among soups made with meat stock, that would reflect the distinction the period drew between such stock-based purees and the lighter maigre soups made with water alone.