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Vegetables, or Légumes, and Salads. 149: Soubise
Côtelettes de pois à la Comte de Paris are cutlets of peas with Soubise sauce, breadcrumbed and fried; served with Soubise sauce, and peas in the centre.
POTATOES.
Pommes de terre en chemise are boiled in their skins.
Au Boiled and cut in slices, they are served à l'Anglaise with butter ; à la Maître d'hôtel-in Maître d'hôtel sauce ; à la crème-in white sauce; au lard-in white sauce with dice of bacon. gratin, they are dressed with white sauce and grated Parmesan, sprinkled with breadcrumbs and browned; à la Norvégienne, they are served in a cheese sauce. à la Parisienne are cooked in butter and water, with onions, etc. melangées are cut in slices and stewed with slices of apples. à la Lyonnaise-cut in slices and sauté in butter with shallot, etc. If oil is used instead of butter, they are called à la Provençale. Served in Soubise sauce, sprinkled with chopped parsley and grated cheese, they are à la Turque.
Boiled sliced potatoes and six sauces, plus a cutlet made out of peas. The vegetables had a course of their own, and they were dressed with as much attention as the meat.
- The potato list is a sauce listButter, Maître d’hôtel, white sauce, white sauce with bacon, cheese and breadcrumbs, cheese sauce, Soubise. The potato is boiled and sliced in every case. If you want to cook from this page, pick the sauce; the potato part takes care of itself.
- Lyonnaise and Provençale are the same dishSliced potatoes sautéed with shallot in butter are à la Lyonnaise; the identical dish made with oil is à la Provençale. Two names, one pan, and the only difference is the fat, which is as clear a demonstration of how this book works as anything in it.
- En chemise means in the skinLiterally in its shirt: boiled unpeeled. The phrase is worth knowing because the book uses it as a starting point and never explains it again.
- Potatoes stewed with appleMelangées is sliced potato and sliced apple stewed together, and it is the one unexpected thing on the page. It is also plausible: apple collapses into the starch and sharpens it, and it belongs with pork.
- Maître d’hôtel is butter with parsley and lemonWorked cold, sliced onto the hot food, and used throughout this book without explanation. It is the house finish, and it accounts for a surprising number of entries that look like separate recipes.
- The pea cutlet is a shaped puréeCôtelettes de pois are a bound pea purée formed into cutlet shapes, crumbed and fried, then served with more of the same sauce and whole peas in the middle. The shaping is the whole idea: a vegetable dish deliberately dressed as a chop.
Soubise sauce appears twice on this page, under the peas and under the potatoes, and that repetition is the most informative thing here. A kitchen of this kind kept a small number of standing sauces on hand, white sauce, Soubise, Maître d’hôtel butter, and worked through the whole vegetable chapter with them, which is why one onion purée can turn up on a fried pea cutlet and on sliced potatoes with parsley and cheese in the space of twenty lines. It also tells you that vegetables were a course rather than an accompaniment: they came to the table in their own dish, with their own sauce and their own name on the card, at a point in the meal when nothing else was competing with them. The page number that has survived into this entry’s title is an accident of the original printing, not part of the heading.