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Soups or Potages: Indienne
Of the thick soups there are also :- Putage queues de bœuf à l'Indienne. A curry soup with pieces of ox-tail in it.
Mulligatawny. Curry soup. With this and all soups "à l'Indienne," rice is served on a separate dish. à la Hesse. Ox-cheek soup. aux rognons. Kidney soup. Ox-kidney soup is called Potage à la Sydney. queues de veau. Calf's-tail soup. À l'Indienne, it is curried. aux pieds de veau. Calf's-feet soup. With the addition of barley, it is called à la Balmoral. tête de veau à l'Indienne. Calf's-head soup, curried. aux queues d'agneau. Lamb's-tail soup. à l'anguille. Eel soup. à la Bisque. Crab soup.
Bisque à la Normande. Shrimp soup.
A list of thick soups, almost all of them built from the parts of an animal that a modern butcher does not put in the window. The gloss beside each name is often two words, because the book assumes the kitchen knows the rest.
- Most of these cuts must now be orderedOx cheek, ox kidney, calf’s tail, calf’s feet, calf’s head, lamb’s tails. Oxtail and ox cheek have come back and are cheap and excellent. The calf’s head soup cannot realistically be reproduced, and lamb’s tails are not sold. This is a page where honest substitution reaches its limit fairly quickly.
- Calf’s feet were the gelatineThey are in the soup for body, not flavour: long simmering draws out enough gelatine to give the liquid a texture that coats the spoon. A pig’s trotter does the same job and is easy to buy; a sachet of powdered gelatine gives the set without the richness. This is also the reason so much of this book is able to set things in aspic.
- The rice came separatelyWith this and all soups à l’Indienne, rice is served on a separate dish. The rice was handed round and each diner added it, so the soup never sat thickening in the tureen. It is a better arrangement than a bowl of rice already drowned, and worth copying.
- Bisque did not mean lobsterHere à la Bisque is crab soup, and Bisque à la Normande is shrimp. Nothing in the word implies lobster, and nothing in it implies cream either. A modern menu’s bisque is nearly always both, which has narrowed a useful general term down to one expensive dish.
- Thick and clear were a pairThe page opens Of the thick soups there are also, because the soup course of such a dinner was commonly two soups, one clear and one thick, offered together so a guest could choose. That is why a dinner card of this period names two, and why the book sorts its soups into these two families before anything else.
- The names cannot be worked outOx-kidney soup is Potage à la Sydney; calf’s-feet soup with barley added becomes à la Balmoral; ox-cheek is à la Hesse. None of these can be deduced. The existence of this book is the proof: you had to look them up.
This page quietly dismantles the idea that a formal dinner meant expensive ingredients. The soup course of such a meal ran on cheeks, tails, feet and heads, which were among the cheapest things a butcher sold, and what made them fit for company was labour: a calf’s head took the better part of a day to clean, blanch, simmer and strain. The division at this table was not between cheap food and costly food but between food a kitchen had time for and food it did not. A household with a cook and a scullery maid could put a shilling’s worth of offal on the table under a French name and nobody would have thought it odd.