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Flemish Soup
Cut into small pieces carrots, onions, and turnips in equal quantities sufficient to make 2 cupfuls; add 2 leeks cut in small pieces, a small head of lettuce, breaking the leaves in two or more pieces, a little chervil, and a head of endive. Put these in a saucepan with a lump of butter the size of a walnut, pour over them a pint of beef or mutton broth, and boil until the vegetables are all tender, stirring frequently. Add 2 quarts of boiling broth, a teaspoonful of sugar, salt and pepper as required, and simmer one hour; just before serving beat the yolks of 3 eggs light with a half-pint of rich cream, and stir briskly into the soup.
A vegetable soup finished with an egg-and-cream liaison, which is the step that decides whether it succeeds. Everything before it is straightforward simmering.
- Do not boil after the liaisonOnce the yolks and cream go in, keep the soup below a simmer — around 170-180F. Temper by whisking a ladle or two of hot soup into the yolk-cream mixture first, then stir that back into the pot off the heat, or the yolks will scramble into threads.
- A lump of butter the size of a walnutRoughly 1 oz, or 2 tablespoons. It is there to sweat the vegetables, not to enrich the finished soup.
- Broth quantitiesA pint (2 cups) to start the vegetables, then 2 quarts of boiling broth added later — about 2.5 quarts of liquid in all. Adding it already boiling keeps the pot from stalling.
- Chervil and endiveChervil is a delicate anise-scented herb that loses its flavour with long cooking; hold most of it back and add it near the end. "A head of endive" here means the curly frisée type rather than a Belgian endive chicon, though either works — Belgian endive will be more bitter.
- Lettuce and leeksThe lettuce collapses to almost nothing, so a full head is not excessive. Split the leeks lengthwise and rinse well; grit sits between the layers and will not cook out.
- The half-pint of creamOne cup. Heavy or whipping cream is the closest modern match to "rich cream"; half-and-half will work but gives a thinner finish.
- TimingThe initial cooking takes 10-15 minutes for cut vegetables of this size. The subsequent hour of simmering is for flavour rather than tenderness — shorten it to 30 minutes if you want the carrots and turnips to keep some definition.
- YieldSomething under 2.5 quarts before the liaison, depending on how much reduces during the hour's simmering; enough for roughly eight to ten first-course servings.
Flemish soup belongs to a long family of northern European potages in which a mixed handful of garden vegetables and greens is stewed in butter, moistened with meat broth, and finished with egg yolks and cream — a yolk liaison of the kind long used in French kitchens, and one that persisted alongside roux and starch thickeners rather than being displaced by them. The Low Countries connection is the vegetable list: leeks, turnips, endive and chervil are staples of Flemish and Dutch cooking, and chervil is a familiar element of Belgian soups. Compendia of this kind commonly gathered regional names in their soup chapters, offering the household cook a way to put a lightly foreign name on the table without straying far from the stockpot she already kept going.