Home › Soups or Potages › Soups or Potages: Potage
Soups or Potages: Potage
This is sometimes called Potage Faubonne. à la Printanière, or Potage printanier, has early summer vegetables cut in small shapes, with green peas and asparagus heads. à la Kursel is Printanière soup with lettuces. à la Chiffonade has lettuces stamped out with a cutter, and peas.
Consommé à la D'Esclignac has a garnish of turnips, and small squares of custard. à la Royale and à l'Impériale have small shapes of custard, which may be white, or coloured red and green.
Printanier à la Royale has the vegetables as in "à la Printanière," and the little pieces of custard as in "à la Royale." à la Portugaise is garnished with shreds of leeks, and French plums. à la Française has a mixed vegetable garnish.
With the addition of rice it is called à la Fleury. à la Clermont has little slices of onion fried brown. à la Crécy is garnished with shreds of carrots. à la Prince has turnips cut into little balls. à la Russe has shreds of carrot, celery and leeks. à la Dustan has haricot beans. à la D'Artois, or à la Saint-Germain, has a garnish of peas. aux choux farcis has stuffed Brussels sprouts. aux pommes olives has potatoes cut in the shape of olives. aux trois racines is garnished with carrots, turnips and celery. aux pointes d'asperges has asparagus heads. Any vegetable or herb may be used as a garnish, and the soup is named accordingly. aux œufs pochés has poached eggs.
Consommé aux profiterolles has little baked balls of a light "choux" paste. aux quenelles has very small quenelles. à la Romaine has little quenelles made of breadcrumbs. à la Bavière has quenelles made of semolina. à la Florentine has cheese quenelles. This is sometimes called à la Vénitienne. à la Parmentier has quenelles made of potatoes. aux épinards has quenelles made with spinach. aux petits jambonneaux has little quenelles of ham. au macaroni has a garnish of macaroni; au vermicelle has vermicelli. Grated Parmesan should be served with these soups. aux nouilles has poached strips of German paste made of flour, eggs, butter, etc. aux pâtes d'Italie, sometimes called Potage aux lazagnes, has pieces of Italian paste. à la semoule, au tapioca, and au riz are respectively garnished with semolina, tapioca, and rice. aux huîtres is garnished with oysters. aux œufs filés is garnished with an egg custard in threads, made by passing it through a colander. à la Poissonnière is garnished with quenelles of fish. à la Montglas has quenelles made of liver farce. à la Sévigné has little shapes of chicken cream. à la Prince de Galles has little pieces of chicken enveloped in forcemeat, pieces of custard cut in the same shape, and asparagus points.
There is only one soup on this page. Every name in the list is a garnish dropped into the same clear consommé, and the soup is renamed according to what went in.
- À la Royale is a baked egg custardA savoury custard, set, cooled, and cut into small shapes with a cutter. It is still a classic garnish for clear soup, it is easy, and the page defines it in six words, which is more than it gives most of the entries here.
- Three names you will meet againCrécy is carrots, Saint-Germain is peas, Printanière is early summer vegetables cut into shapes. These three have survived onto modern menus, and this page is the key to them.
- Chiffonade meant stamped-out lettuceHere it is lettuce cut into rounds with a cutter. The modern meaning, leaves rolled and shredded into fine ribbons, will give you something quite different from what the card described, and the difference is visible in the bowl.
- Profiteroles were savouryConsommé aux profiterolles is small baked balls of choux paste floating in clear soup. No cream, no chocolate. This is the entry most likely to mislead a modern reader completely.
- Fifteen ways to make a quenelleA quenelle is a poached forcemeat dumpling, and the list runs through breadcrumb, semolina, cheese, potato, spinach, ham, liver, chicken cream and fish. Read the page as a prompt rather than a menu: whatever you have can be bound, poached and dropped in the soup, and it will take a name from the thing it was made of.
- Prunes in clear soupÀ la Portugaise is garnished with shreds of leek and French plums. It is the one combination on the page that has gone entirely, and it is worth a thought before dismissing it, since a prune in a strong clear broth behaves much as it does with pork.
A page that can name forty soups out of one pot is a page about labour, and about where that labour sat in the house. The consommé was the hard part: meat, bones and vegetables simmered for hours, then clarified with egg white and strained until it ran clear, all of it done once and early. After that, a cook with a set of small cutters, a bowl of forcemeat and whatever vegetables came in could produce a different named soup for every day of the month at almost no extra cost. The hostess’s share of the work was the naming, and the final instruction on the page, that grated Parmesan should be served with the pasta soups, is the kind of thing she needed to know and the cook already did.