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Parisian Soup
Cut 4 or 5 leeks into strips and fry in a little butter. Add to them a quart of good mutton stock; add salt and pepper to taste. Add 6 boiled potatoes cut into slices, and boil all together until the leeks are thoroughly cooked. Serve in a tureen with croutons strewn over the top.
A leek and potato soup built on mutton stock rather than the more familiar chicken or vegetable base. The whole character of the dish rests on that stock, and on not letting the leeks scorch in the butter.
- Sweat, do not fry"Fry in a little butter" here means soften over low heat until the leeks collapse and turn silky, roughly 8-10 minutes. Colour on leeks turns bitter and will carry through the finished soup.
- Clean the leeks properlySplit lengthwise and rinse between the layers before cutting into strips; grit lodges deep in the white and pale green. Use the white and light green only, and reserve the tough dark tops for stock.
- Mutton stockLamb or mutton stock is rarely sold ready-made. Simmer lamb neck or shoulder bones with an onion, carrot and bay for three hours, or substitute a good chicken stock, which gives a lighter but perfectly serviceable soup.
- Quantities and yieldA quart of stock to four or five leeks and six potatoes makes a very thick, solid soup: more vegetable than broth. On these quantities it will stretch to about four servings; loosen with more stock if you want something spoonable.
- PotatoesBoiling them separately, as directed, keeps the broth clear rather than clouded with starch. Waxy potatoes hold their slices; floury ones will break down and thicken the soup, which is not necessarily unwelcome.
- Final cooking timeOnce the potatoes go in, the leeks need only another 10-15 minutes. Longer and the slices disintegrate into the stock, which changes the dish from a garnished broth into a puree.
- CroutonsCubes of stale bread crisped in butter or oil. The recipe strews them over the tureen; if you would rather they stayed crisp, hand them separately at the table, as they soften quickly once they sit in the soup.
- SeasoningTaste the stock before adding salt, particularly if it is a reduced or bought stock, and season at the end rather than at the frying stage.
Leeks and potatoes in broth are among the oldest and plainest things a French kitchen produces, and the name "Parisian" was attached loosely to such soups in nineteenth-century English-language cookbooks. The better-known relative is potage parmentier, named for Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the agronomist generally credited with persuading the French to eat potatoes in the late eighteenth century. The mutton stock and the pre-boiled potatoes suggest a domestic kitchen making use of what a joint and a previous day's cooking had left behind.