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Soups or Potages: Cream
Potage à la crème d'orge. Cream of barley soup.
Garnished with quenelles of chicken, it is called à la Marie Louise. à la crème de riz. Cream of rice. With the addition of Parmesan, it may be called à la Milton. Garnished with asparagus heads, it is Potage à l'Argenteuil. à la crème de tapioca. Cream of tapioca. à la crème d'avoine. Cream of oatmeal.
When chervil is added to a soup, à la peluche, or à la chiffonade, de cerfeuil may be appended to the name. With poached eggs, it is called à la Colbert, or with mixed vegetables, à la Paysanne.
If maigre soups are required, Potage Julienne, and many of the vegetable soups, may be made without stock. The following are also sug. gested:- Potage au lait d'amandes is made of rice milk and almond milk. d'amandes à la Colbert is a white almond soup, garnished with poached eggs. aux noix de coco.
Cocoanut soup. à la Paysanne. Mixed vegetable soup. à la Savoyarde. Vegetable soup, poured over slices of bread sprinkled with grated cheese. à la Monaco. Milk with yolks of eggs, poured over toast. (17)
Cream soups that contain no cream, and a set of meatless alternatives for days when stock was not allowed. The page is a naming system laid over four or five actual preparations.
- The cream is the cerealCrème d’orge, crème de riz, crème de tapioca, crème d’avoine: barley, rice, tapioca and oatmeal, cooked soft and passed through a sieve until smooth. The body comes from starch. A blender replaces the sieve and the whole class of soup becomes a twenty-minute proposition.
- Maigre means no meatWhere the page says maigre soups may be made without stock, it is providing for days of abstinence and for invalids. The cook still had to send up something that looked and tasted substantial, and these cereal soups are the answer to that.
- Almond milk, againPotage au lait d’amandes is rice milk and almond milk together. The almond milk is ground almonds steeped in water and strained, far thicker and sweeter than the carton kind. An old technique that has come round again.
- One garnish, one new nameAdd asparagus tips and the soup is à l’Argenteuil. Add a poached egg and it is à la Colbert. Add chervil and you append à la peluche de cerfeuil. Nothing about the soup changes. Only the card does.
- Potage à la MonacoMilk with egg yolks poured over toast. This is nursery and sickroom food, and the page lists it among dinner soups without comment, which says something about what the period expected of a light first course.
What this page quietly records is a kitchen organised around a stockpot and around the days when the stockpot was shut. Meat stock was the foundation of everything, and a household observing fast days, or carrying an invalid upstairs, needed soups that did not touch it. Barley, rice, oatmeal and almonds were all in the store cupboard, cost next to nothing, and when sieved smooth they passed for richness. The French names are the last step: once the soup is acceptable it still has to be announced.