Bonne Femme
The name given to a remarkable soup in which an attempt has been made to paint the character of a good woman. Why not? Beethoven in his Pastoral Symphony has by music alone set before us a landscape; and why should not a cook be able in a soup to symbolise womanhood? The two most important symbols which he selects are the acidity of sorrel and the softness of cream. There is a gracious sauvity in the soup, with a subacid flavour to remind one pleasantly of the little gleams of temper without which this exquisite creation could not be a woman. There is an addition of fowl or chicken broth in memory of Dame Partlet and her sisters, who love, honour, and obey the sultan of the hen-roost. And there is a good allowance of butter, to symbolize the adulation of courtship and the praises which the poet says are the wages of the sex.
Take a pound of sorrel and cut it first into narrow ribbons; then slantwise into diamonds. Put it into a stewpan and stir it on the fire, with alb. of butter, with salt, and it may be with one ounce of flour. Then add five or six pints of fowl or chicken broth, and let it simmer gently for half an hour. Take it off the fire, and add a leason of six yolks of eggs and a tumblerful of good cream. Finish it with a bit of butter and serve it with crusts.
Bonne Femme Maigre. - Omit the flour, put water for broth, and use cream of rice instead of cream.
Kettner's gives the method in a single rush of prose after the essay; unpacked, it is a classic sorrel velouté finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. Two things decide whether it works: the sorrel must be cooked gently enough to keep its acidity, and the liaison must never boil.
- The liaison"Leason" is liaison: six yolks beaten with the cream, then slackened with a ladle of the hot soup before going back into the pan off the heat. Return it to the lowest possible flame only long enough to thicken, around 175F. Above about 185F the yolks scramble and the soup turns grainy, and it cannot be brought back.
- How much butter"alb. of butter" appears to be a corrupted fraction of a pound; a quarter pound (about 115 g) would suit a pound of sorrel and five to six pints of broth. A half pound is defensible in the Victorian register but very rich by current taste.
- SorrelGarden or French sorrel, sold in spring at farmers' markets and some greengrocers. A pound is a large amount of leaf that collapses to almost nothing; it will melt to a purée in a few minutes rather than needing long cooking. Spinach with lemon is the usual substitute but gives none of the sharpness the recipe is built around.
- PanSorrel is high in oxalic acid and will take on a metallic taste and grey colour in bare aluminium or unlined copper. Use stainless steel or enamelled cast iron.
- VolumesAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so five or six pints is roughly 2.8 to 3.4 litres — a large pot yielding eight to ten servings. A tumblerful of cream is usually reckoned at about 8 to 10 fl oz (240–285 ml).
- The flourOne ounce of flour for six pints is a very light bind, cooked into the butter and sorrel as a loose roux. It is there to keep the soup from separating; with a good yolk liaison and careful heat it can be left out, as the maigre version instructs.
- Simmering timeHalf an hour applies to the broth once the sorrel is in, and serves mainly to marry the flavours. If you are using a well-made stock, twenty minutes at a bare simmer is enough; longer dulls the fresh acidity that the whole conceit of the soup depends on.
- "Serve it with crusts"Small dice or fingers of bread dried or fried in butter, offered separately rather than stirred in. Modern croutons are the same thing.
- The lenten versionBonne Femme Maigre is the meatless form for fast days: water for broth, no flour, and "cream of rice" — rice flour slaked in a little cold water — in place of dairy cream. It thickens but will not enrich, so expect a thinner, sharper soup.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877, generally attributed to E. S. Dallas) is unusual among Victorian cookery books for treating dishes as subjects for essays, and this entry is a fair sample of its manner: a page of speculation about symbolising womanhood in sorrel and cream, followed almost as an afterthought by the working method. The name itself is plainer than the essay allows. À la bonne femme in French cookery means "in the good wife's manner" — home cooking, the unfussy treatment — and it attaches to a whole family of dishes, from potage bonne femme to sole bonne femme, that share only a domestic, unelaborate character. Sorrel soup thickened with yolks and cream was a fixture of French bourgeois kitchens well before Kettner's, and sorrel was then a common kitchen-garden green in England too; its retreat from British cooking over the following century is the reason the recipe now reads as exotic. The maigre variant is a reminder of how far the fast-day calendar still shaped restaurant menus, calling here for a version in which the cream is replaced while the butter and egg-yolk leason remain.