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Potage à la Hollandaise
Ingredients.
One quart of Veal or Chicken Stock.
Two ounces of Butter.
One ounce of Flour.
Four yolks of Eggs.
Half a pint of Cream.
One gill of Green Peas cooked.
One gill of cut Carrots cooked.
One gill of cut Cucumber cooked.
One teaspoonful of chopped Tarragon.
One teaspoonful of Sugar.
One teaspoonful of Salt.
Trim the peas, carrots, and cucumber with a round cutter the size and shape of peas. Cook them in boiling water, being careful not to cook them too much. Melt the butter and flour in a stewpan; add the stock, and let it boil well.
Break the yolks of eggs into a basin and add the cream (making a liaison); then add this liaison of eggs and cream to the stock; let it just come to a boil, being careful it does not curdle. Strain into a clean stewpan, and add the vegetables, which have been previously cooked, and the tarragon, and serve.
A velouté finished with an egg-and-cream liaison, garnished with three vegetables cut to the size of peas. The technique is straightforward; the timing of the liaison is not.
- Never actually boil the liaisonThe instruction to "let it just come to a boil" is the one place this soup fails. Yolks set around 160-180F, and at a true boil they scramble into threads. Bring the thickened stock to just below a simmer, temper it into the yolks and cream, then return it to low heat and stir until it coats the back of a spoon.
- Gills and pintsThis is a British book, so a gill is 5 fluid ounces, roughly 2/3 US cup, and the half pint of cream is 10 fluid ounces. The quart of stock is 40 fluid ounces imperial rather than the 32 of a US quart.
- "Melt the butter and flour"This means make a white roux: melt the 2 oz butter, stir in the 1 oz flour, and cook it two or three minutes without letting it colour. The proportion is light, giving a soup that pours rather than a thick sauce.
- Cutting the garnishA round cutter the size of a pea is a small Parisienne scoop, about 8-10 mm. Carrots and cucumber are scooped into balls so that all three vegetables match the peas. Failing that, dice them small and evenly; the point is uniformity, not the sphere.
- The cucumberCucumber balls need only a minute or two in boiling water. Cooked further they collapse and weep; the recipe's caution against overcooking applies to all three vegetables. Seed the cucumber before scooping.
- StrainingStrain the finished liaison through a fine sieve before the vegetables go in. This catches any yolk that has set and is the difference between a smooth soup and a grainy one; do not skip it even if the surface looks clean.
- TarragonAdd the chopped tarragon off the heat, at the last moment. Held hot it turns grassy and loses the anise note that distinguishes this soup from a plain velouté.
- Holding and reheatingOnce the yolks are in, the soup cannot be brought back to a boil or held over direct heat. Keep it in a bain-marie until served, and do not plan on leftovers reheated in a pan.
- YieldAbout four to six small soup plates as a first course, which is the scale this kind of menu assumes.
The name attaches a Dutch label to a French technique: à la hollandaise in nineteenth-century kitchen French generally signalled a preparation enriched with egg yolks and butter or cream, the same logic that names hollandaise sauce, rather than anything specifically eaten in the Netherlands. Soups of this type, a light velouté finished with a liaison of yolks and cream and garnished with tiny turned vegetables, were staples of the professional repertoire codified by Carême and his successors, and books of "high class cookery" carried them into the private houses and cookery schools of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The labour is the point: scooping carrot and cucumber into pea-sized balls so that the garnish reads as a single uniform thing is work that only made sense in a kitchen with staff, and it is exactly the kind of detail that separated a dinner-party soup from the household's everyday broth.