Home › Soups with Meat, and Purees › Velvet Soup Maigre
Velvet Soup Maigre
This is a very simple and economical soup, as there is no meat in it. Cook some tapioca in water with a little salt and pepper. Put a lump of butter in a tureen and the yolks of 2 or 3 eggs. Pour the boiling tapioca over the eggs and butter, stir up well, and serve.
A liaison soup with almost nothing in it: starch-thickened water bound at the last moment with egg yolk and butter. The original gives no quantities, so the proportions below are the working ones.
- ProportionsFor four servings, figure roughly 1/3 cup small pearl or quick-cooking tapioca to 1 quart water, 2 tablespoons butter and 3 yolks. Larger pearl tapioca needs soaking and will give a soup of quite different texture.
- The hinge is the temperature of the tureenTemperature matters -- the tapioca must be genuinely boiling when it goes over the yolks, and a warmed tureen helps; off the boil the yolks will thin the soup rather than thicken it. The recipe itself says only to pour the boiling tapioca over the eggs and butter and stir well.
- Egg safetyTempering yolks in a cold tureen may not bring them to a safe temperature. Use pasteurized yolks, or whisk the mixture back into the pan and hold it at 160F, stirring, until it coats a spoon -- but do not let it approach a simmer or it will scramble.
- "Maigre"French kitchen shorthand for a dish without meat. Here it means the cooking liquid is plain salted water; a vegetable stock gives a far better soup and keeps within the spirit of the thing.
- SeasoningSalted water and pepper alone are thin. A blade of mace, a strip of lemon peel or a little nutmeg in the cooking water, removed before serving, are seasonings of the sort used in comparable soups and still work here, though this recipe specifies none of them.
- Serve at onceThe bound soup will not reheat -- the yolks curdle on a second boil. Ladle it out directly from the tureen.
Soupe maigre is a whole category rather than a single dish: the lean soup made for fast days, Fridays and Lent, when the Catholic calendar barred meat from the pot. English cookbooks took up the term in the eighteenth century and it persisted as a byword for cheap, meatless cookery. The tapioca is the newer element: pearl tapioca, processed from cassava root, reached Western kitchens through the colonial trade and by the second half of the nineteenth century was a widely sold thickener, useful for giving body to water when there was no stock to be had. The finish -- boiling liquid whisked onto yolks and butter -- is the French liaison, a technique associated with velvety, velouté-style soups, applied here to the plainest broth imaginable, and the word "velvet" in the title points to what that binding achieves.