Home › Vegetables › Soup Crécy
Soup Crécy
4 good-sized carrots, 1 pint of milk, 1 onion, 2 bay-leaves, 1 pint of water, Piece of bacon rind or a small piece of bacon, Salt and pepper to taste.
Scrape and grate the carrots into the water; add the bacon, onion and bay-leaves. Simmer gently thirty minutes. Then remove the bay-leaves and bacon, add the milk and seasoning and, when boiling hot, serve.
The ingredient list as printed is incomplete — carrots, onion, bay leaves and milk all appear in the method but only the water, bacon rind and seasoning are quantified. Treat the method as the reliable part and scale from the pint of water.
- The missing quantitiesFor 1 pint (20 fl oz) of water, roughly 1 lb of carrots, 1 medium onion and 2 bay leaves give a workable balance, with about 1 pint of milk added at the end. The original gives no figures for these, so this is a reconstruction rather than a conversion.
- Imperial pintIf you are working from the British text as written, a pint is 20 fl oz, not the American 16. The difference matters more in the milk than in the water.
- Grate, do not chopGrating the carrot is what makes thirty minutes enough. Diced carrot in the same time will still be firm and the soup will stay thin and watery rather than thickening from the pulp.
- Bacon rindThe rind is there purely as a flavouring and comes out before serving. Butchers rarely sell it separately now; a rasher of streaky bacon or a scrap of pancetta does the same job.
- Add the milk off the boilThe original says to serve it "boiling hot", but bring it only to serving heat after the milk goes in rather than letting it boil hard: carrot soup with milk catches and scorches on the base of the pan quickly.
- Onion treatmentThe onion goes in raw with the water, so slice it thinly to be sure it is fully soft in the thirty minutes. Sweating it in a little of the bacon fat first gives a rounder soup, though it is not what the original asks for.
- TextureAs written this is a rough, unstrained soup, thickened by the broken-down carrot rather than smooth. A brief blitz with a stick blender after the bay and bacon come out gives a smoother result if that is what you want.
- YieldAbout 1 quart finished, serving three or four as a first course.
Anything called Crécy in a French or Anglo-French kitchen means carrots. The name is generally traced to Crécy in Picardy, long associated with carrot growing, though the Seine-et-Marne Crécy also claims it and the attribution is traditional rather than documented. By the late nineteenth century potage Crécy was standard enough to appear in English household books without explanation. The bacon rind is the older, thriftier layer of the dish: before stock cubes, a scrap of cured pork was the ordinary way to put savour into a pan of water. The finishing milk suggests a domestic version — a restaurant kitchen might well have reached for cream or a veal stock instead.