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Potato Soup (Through the pur e sieve Return)
through the purée sieve. Return the soup to the kettle and add one quart of milk and the cup of peas. Rub two ounces of butter and four tablespoonfuls of flour until smooth, stir into the soup, and stir continually until the soup is thick and smooth. It should be the consistency of thick cream. Season with salt and pepper and serve.
This is the tail end of a longer potato soup recipe — the page picks up after the potatoes have been cooked and passed through a sieve. What survives is the finishing method, which is the part worth reading closely.
- What is missingThe opening instructions for the potato base are not on this page; the quantity of potatoes and the cooking liquid are unknown. What survives is the finishing: the quart of milk, the cup of peas, and the flour-butter thickening.
- Purée sieveA conical or drum sieve with a wooden pestle. A food mill on the fine plate gives the same texture; a blender or stick blender makes it smoother and slightly gluey, since potato starch turns elastic when overworked. Pulse briefly if using one.
- Beurre manié, not a rouxThe butter and flour are rubbed together raw and stirred into hot soup: this is beurre manié. Add it in small pinches while the soup is at a bare simmer, stirring between each, or it will tend to set into lumps that are hard to beat out.
- Cook out the flourThe recipe says only to stir until thick and smooth, but four tablespoons of flour will taste pasty unless the soup is given a gentle simmer of several minutes after the butter-flour goes in. Stir the bottom of the pan; a milk-and-starch soup scorches readily.
- Two ounces of butterHalf a stick, 4 tablespoons, 55 g. Paired with 4 tablespoons of flour this is a fairly heavy thickening for the quart of milk plus the potato purée, which is why the target is "thick cream" rather than a thin soup.
- The cup of peasReferred to as already prepared, so cooked peas. Frozen peas need only two or three minutes in the hot soup; adding them at the end keeps them green rather than olive.
- KettleIn this period a kettle is a large open cooking pot, not a tea kettle. Use a heavy-bottomed saucepan of at least three quarts.
- YieldNot calculable from this fragment: the quart of milk is the only measured liquid, and the volume of the potato base is unknown.
Potato soup thickened with a raw flour-and-butter paste uses the technique known in French cookery as beurre manié, applied here to the cheapest things in the cellar. Milk and butter do the work of giving body and richness where stock might otherwise have done it. The cup of peas adds a little sweetness and some colour to a bowl that would otherwise be entirely beige.