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Julienne Soup
2 quarts of stock, 2 carrots, I turnip, 2 onions or six young leeks, A head of lettuce, White part of head of celery, A few pieces of cauliflower, 2 tablespoonfuls of peas, A few heads of asparagus.
Make your stock according to the preceding recipe.
Remove the fat. Put the stock in a soup kettle. Cut the carrot into fancy shapes or strips with a vegetable cutter, cut the turnip in the same way. Cut the onion into tiny pieces and the celery in pieces about half an inch long. Divide the cauliflower into flowerets. Cover all the vegetables with boiling water and boil fifteen minutes. Drain in a colander, then add to the stock and simmer gently one hour. Then add the pieces of asparagus heads and simmer ten minutes. Then add the lettuce torn into pieces the size of a half dollar, cook five minutes, season with salt and pepper and serve.
1 pint of lentils, I onion, A sprig of thyme,
A clear soup built on strips of vegetable, and the whole point is the knife work: the garnish should stay distinct in the broth. Two things in the original need attention — the simmering time and the peas.
- The hinge: cut size and cooking timeJulienne means matchsticks, roughly 1/8 inch square and 1 to 1-1/2 inches long. Fifteen minutes of blanching plus a full hour of simmering will reduce strips that fine to threads; blanch briefly, then give the carrot and turnip 10 to 15 minutes in the stock, adding the softer vegetables in stages so everything finishes together.
- The blanching step is not optionalBoiling the vegetables separately and draining them keeps cabbage-family sulphur compounds and onion sharpness out of the broth, which is what preserves the clarity this soup depends on. Do not tip the blanching water into the stock.
- The peas are never addedThe peas go unmentioned -- Two tablespoonfuls of peas appear in the list and are never named again in the method; whether they are meant to be swept up in "cover all the vegetables" is unclear. Add them with the asparagus, or in the last two or three minutes if frozen.
- Stray text at the end"1 pint of lentils, 1 onion, a sprig of thyme" belongs to the following recipe in the book and has nothing to do with this soup.
- StockTwo quarts of well-skimmed clear stock. The original refers back to the preceding recipe's homemade stock, which is not reproduced here; a good low-sodium commercial broth works, but season at the end since it reduces slightly over the simmer.
- "White part of head of celery"The pale inner ribs, milder and less stringy than the outer stalks. Today's Pascal-type celery is generally less fibrous than older varieties, so ordinary ribs will do if you peel the ridges off.
- Vegetable cutterA period tin gadget for stamping rounds and stars. A sharp knife or a mandoline gives cleaner strips; skip the fancy shapes unless you want them.
- LettuceA firm romaine or the heart of an iceberg holds up; tender leaf lettuce collapses. Five minutes is right — it should wilt, not dissolve.
- YieldTwo quarts of stock serves six to eight as a first course.
Julienne is a cutting term before it is a dish: French cookery of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used it for vegetables shredded into fine strips, and the name is often said to derive from a cook or gardener called Julien, though no such person has ever been documented. Clear soups of this kind were codified in the nineteenth-century French repertoire, where the broth is a plain canvas and the garnish carries the identity — consomme julienne, consomme brunoise, and so on. Its appearance in an American cookbook of this period reflects how thoroughly French service had entered the middle-class dining room: a household that would never attempt a sauce espagnole was still expected to produce a clear soup with neatly cut garnish. The long list of vegetables here also suits a late-spring dish, when asparagus, young leeks, peas and cauliflower could plausibly be on hand at once.