Purées
A purée meant at first peppery-its original form being poivrée. The old meaning of the word being lost, it is now supposed to be something purified by being passed through a sieve or a tammy.
Purée of dried vegetables, as peas, haricots, lentils. - Soak them over night in abundance of warm water. Next day put them into the pot with cold water, a carrot, an onion, a leek, a faggot of sweet-herbs and some salt, and cook them till they are perfectly tender. If it has not been possible to steep them beforehand, it will be enough to proceed as follows. At the end of half an hour pour into the pot a wineglassful of cold water, and repeat this every half-hour till the vegetables are done. If they are intended for soup, take out the carrot and the herbs, and, without being too careful about draining them, pound them in a mortar, and pass them through a hair sieve. If they are intended for a garnish or for an entremet, they should be well drained in order to be thick enough. After travelling through the sieve they will take kindly to a tablespoonful of shalot if chopped very finely and passed in a liberal supply of butter. Mix shalot, butter, and purée well together; and further, according to need, use a moistening of broth, Quails of milk, or of the liquor in which the vegetables have boiled.
For the Purée of fresh vegetables-whether these are peas and beans; roots such as carrots, turnips, potatoes; fruits such as the tomato or the gourd; leaves like sorrel and endive; or bulbs like the onion-the process is practically the same: first boiling, then the mortar, then the sieve, next the seasoning, and again, perhaps, the tammy, if the Purée is to be very fine. There are differences, however, of seasoning which will be found in detail under the name of each vegetable.
One of the leading points of difference between English and French cookery turns on the greater carefulness of the latter in making a Purée. It is not a question of skill; it is wholly one of good faith. The English cook is content with slovenly work: hence mashed potatoes full of lumps, and spinach full of strings and coarse. The English cook shirks the labour of the sieve. If the thing is worth doing it is worth doing well; and it must be repeated that the result depends not upon skill, but upon honesty. It is the honesty of their work, as much as anything else, that gives the French cooks their superiority in dressed vegetables.
UAILS are a kind of dwarf partridge; and in the summer months, when as yet the partridge is inviolable, they are a pleasant substitute.
They come chiefly from Egypt, in consignments of perhaps 50,000 at a time, and they bear travel so well that not more than seven per cent. perish on the road. The French have many ways of dressing the quail for table. The English have only one; but it is the Quenelle best way of all. Let the quail be barded with bacon; under which tie a vineleaf; roast him for ten minutes before a brisk fire, and serve him on toast, with gravy in a boat apart.
The method is sound and still worth following; only the vocabulary and the equipment have moved on. Note that the final paragraph about quail is stray text from the following entry and has nothing to do with purées.
- The point of the whole thingThe sieve is the recipe. Everything else is boiling and seasoning, and the author is right that a purée pushed through a fine mesh has a texture no amount of mashing will give you. Work it through with a stiff rubber spatula or a ladle rather than trying to force it.
- TammyA tammy is a loosely woven worsted or cotton cloth through which two people twisted the purée. A fine-mesh conical sieve (chinois) or a drum sieve does the same job, and a food mill fitted with the fine plate handles most vegetables in one pass.
- WineglassfulRoughly 2 fl oz, or a quarter cup. The trick of adding cold water every half hour to legumes cooked without soaking is old kitchen lore; whether it does much is doubtful. Age of the pulses and the hardness of the water matter far more.
- Faggot of sweet-herbsA bouquet garni: parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string or bundled in a leek leaf so it lifts out whole.
- ShalotShallot. A tablespoon finely chopped and softened gently in a generous amount of butter without browning, then beaten into the purée. This is the seasoning step that separates a purée from plain mashed pulses.
- Soaking, by typeDried peas, haricots and other beans still benefit from an overnight soak in plenty of warm water. Lentils do not need it, and soaking tends to leave them softer than you want; put them straight into the pot.
- Potatoes are the exceptionWhere the recipe extends the method to potatoes, do not use a blender or food processor. The blade ruptures the starch and turns them to glue. A ricer, a food mill, or a sieve as described here is the way to a smooth potato purée.
- Consistency and yieldConsistency -- For soup, thin with the cooking liquor or broth to a pourable cream; for a garnish or entremet, drain hard and keep it stiff enough to hold a spoon mark. The recipe gives no quantities at all.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877) was written anonymously by the journalist E. S. Dallas and named for Auguste Kettner's Soho restaurant, which is why so many entries read as arguments rather than instructions — the book is a defence of French technique aimed at English households. The derivation of pur\e from poivrée, peppered, is offered here with confidence but is a folk etymology; the word is generally traced instead to Old French purer, to purify or strain, which is exactly the sense the author says was lost. What survives intact is the polemic: the complaint that English cooks "shirk the labour of the sieve" belongs to a long Victorian quarrel in which French cookery stood for patience and English cookery for haste, and the difference between the two is framed as moral rather than technical.