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Soups or Potages: White
Potage Bisque de homard. Lobster soup. à la bisque d'écrevisses. Crayfish soup. aux huîtres. White oyster soup.
Dupoise. Mussel soup. aux raviolis. Game stock with small pieces of forcemeat wrapped in paste. à la Victoria. White soup with barley or rice. à la Reine, or à la Princesse. Chicken purée with cream, garnished with quenelles of chicken, or with dice of fried bread. à la chasseur. Game soup, garnished with pieces of the game. aux herbes printanières. White soup with shred lettuces and other vegetables. à la Russe. Brown soup with vegetables and round balls of sausage meat. à l'Italienne. Fowl stock with purée from vegetables, anchovies, etc., garnished with small pieces of the fowl. à la Régence is a game soup with barley, and hard-boiled yolks of eggs cut in small pieces. à la Frankfort is a chicken soup garnished with asparagus points. à la Prince de Galles is mock-turtle soup with quenelles. à la Castelaine is a brown soup made of beef. à l'Aurore is egg soup--of stock with yolks of eggs. à l'Andalouse is a fish soup with purée of onions and tomatoes, garnished with pieces of crayfish or prawns. Potage à la Provençale or Bouillabaisse is a fish soup with shred Portugal onions, garnished with fillets of several kinds of fish. / à la Comtesse. White soup of veal stock and sweetbreads, with dice of fried bread. à la Chanoinesse. White soup with quenelles of fish, and mackerel roe cut in small square pieces. à la Bonne Femme. White soup with yolks of eggs and shreds of green vegetables. à la Colbert. White soup with poached eggs. à la Milanaise is a white soup with grated cheese.
Thirty soups, and the thing to notice is that most of them are the same two or three soups with something different dropped into the bowl.
- Colour first, ingredient secondWhite, brown, fish, game. In this system a white soup means one built on veal or fowl stock and finished with cream or egg yolk; a brown one is built on beef or game. The name tells you the colour of the bowl before it tells you what is in it, because the colour is what has to be balanced against the rest of the dinner.
- The garnish is the dishÀ la Reine is chicken purée with quenelles. À la Colbert is white soup with a poached egg sitting in it. À la Frankfort is chicken soup with asparagus tips. Change what goes in at the last moment and the soup gets a new name and a new place on the card.
- Quenelles are the labour hereThey appear over and over: pounded meat or fish, worked with egg and a panade, shaped between two spoons and poached. They are the most time-consuming thing on the page and the least explained, because every kitchen could make them.
- Bouillabaisse, filed as Potage à la ProvençaleListed between a brown beef soup and a veal soup, described as a fish soup with shredded Portugal onions garnished with fillets. Treating it as one more entry in an alphabet is precisely how a regional dish gets flattened into a style.
- Mock turtleSoup made from a calf’s head to imitate real turtle. By this point the imitation was the standard article and nobody thought of it as a copy — which is why the page can dress it up again with quenelles and a prince’s name.
- Portugal onionsLarge, mild, sweet onions sold under that name. Any big Spanish onion does the job. They matter in the fish soup because the quantity would be unbearable with a sharp onion.
This page is not for cooking from. It is for the half hour before the menu card was written, when a hostess had to choose a soup that would not collide with anything following it — not the same colour as the sauce on the fish, not the same meat as the remove, not a second purée in an evening already holding one. The thirty names are a sorting system for avoiding repetition across eight courses, and the kitchen only ever had to make two of them.