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Potato Puree
12 medium sized potatoes 2 ozs. (2 heaping tablespoonfuls) butter Salt and pepper I quart (4 cups) white stock 1 teaspoonful onion juice 1 pint (2 cups) cream 2 tablespoonfuls flour 2 tablespoonfuls melted butter 1 teaspoonful onion juice Boil the potatoes in their skins till tender, then cool and peel them. Cut them into quarters and put them into an earthenware pan with the two ounces of butter to brown just a very little in places.
Season with the salt and pepper, then add the stock, cream, and the onion juice.
Allow to boil up, and strain through a sieve; return the purée to the pan and stir into it the melted butter mixed with the flour.
Boil for three minutes and serve hot.
A straightforward potato soup enriched at the end with a butter-and-flour paste. Two details need attention: the vessel and the final thickening.
- The "casserole" is a pan, not a bakeThe "earthenware pan" is a pan, not a bake -- the potatoes are browned in it and the soup boiled up in it, so it is a flameproof clay pot used over direct heat. Most modern earthenware will crack over a burner; use a heavy enameled cast-iron or stainless pot, and if you do use clay, work over a diffuser and raise the heat slowly.
- QuantitiesTwelve medium potatoes is roughly 4 lb; a floury variety such as russet gives the smoothest purée. The 2 oz of butter is half a stick. The ingredient list gives a teaspoon of onion juice twice, but the method calls for onion juice only once, with the stock and cream; the duplication looks like a slip, and both teaspoons can simply go in together.
- White stockA pale unroasted stock, usually veal or chicken. A light chicken stock is the practical equivalent; avoid dark or heavily browned stock, which muddies the colour the dish is built around.
- Onion juiceMade by grating a peeled onion and squeezing the pulp through cheesecloth. It flavours without adding colour or texture. A tablespoon of very finely grated onion works if you are straining the soup anyway.
- Brown "a very little"This step is the hinge. The quartered potatoes should catch gold in a few spots only — enough for a faint toasted note. Push it further and the whole purée tastes scorched, since everything is later sieved together.
- StrainingA sieve here means pressing the solids through with a wooden spoon or a food mill. A blender is faster but overworks potato starch into glue; a ricer or mill, then a whisk, gives a better body.
- The flour and butterTwo tablespoons each of flour and melted butter stirred in raw will taste pasty after only three minutes. Cook them together in a separate pan for two or three minutes first, then whisk into the hot soup and simmer briefly to thicken.
- Heat after the creamOnce the pint of cream is in, keep the soup just below a rolling boil. Hard boiling in the presence of stock salt and dairy risks curdling and dulls the flavour.
- YieldAbout 3 quarts finished — eight to ten first-course servings. It thickens considerably on standing; thin with a little stock when reheating.
Potato purée soups belong to the late nineteenth-century vogue for smooth, sieved "cream" soups, the class French cookery filed under potages purées and which English and American cooks adopted wholesale. This particular version is a near relation of the French potage Parmentier, a potato-and-leek soup generally named for Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the eighteenth-century pharmacist credited with popularising the potato as human food in France, though this recipe uses no leek. The generous pint of cream and quart of stock also mark this as a recipe from a well-provisioned kitchen rather than a thrifty one — a peasant vegetable turned into a dinner-party first course.