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Carrot Soup
Wash and scrape a pound of carrots, slice them, treat two medium sized potatoes in the same manner, add a bay leaf, a sprig of thyme and a chopped onion. Cook all with water, add salt, pepper, and cook gently till tender, when pass it through a sieve. Put in a pan a lump of butter the size of an egg, with a chopped leek and a sprig of chervil. Let it cook gently for three or four minutes, then pour on the puree of carrots and let it all come to the boil before taking it off to serve.
A plain vegetable purée of the sort that filled Belgian kitchens during the First World War, when the book was compiled. The method is sound; only the quantities need pinning down.
- Water quantityThe original never says how much. Cover the vegetables by about an inch — roughly 1.5 litres (6 cups) for a pound of carrots and two potatoes — and hold back some to thin the purée at the end.
- Butter the size of an eggA standard old measure equal to about 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons (55 g). It is doing real work here, so do not cut it down much.
- Passing through a sieveA blender or food mill gives much the same result in a fraction of the time. The period equivalent would have been a sieve worked with a wooden pestle or spoon.
- The leek and chervil stepThis is the hinge. Sweating the leek in butter for three or four minutes before the purée goes in is what separates this from boiled carrot water — do it gently, with no colour on the leek.
- ChervilStill common in Belgium and France, scarce elsewhere. It is anise-scented and delicate; flat-leaf parsley with a pinch of tarragon is the nearest substitute, added off the heat.
- Cooking timeSliced carrots and potatoes are tender in 20 to 25 minutes at a bare simmer. Longer does no harm to a soup that will be puréed anyway, but the flavour dulls.
- Seasoning at the endSalt goes in at the start here, but taste again after the butter and leek are stirred through — the purée swallows salt, and a little pepper on serving lifts it.
- YieldAbout 1.5 litres, serving four as a first course or two or three as a meal with bread.
The Belgian Cook Book was gathered from Belgian refugees in Britain during the First World War. Carrots, potatoes, leeks and onions were all common in the Belgian and northern French kitchen garden, and a purée soup of this kind — thickened by nothing but the potato itself — reads as everyday food rather than a dish with a name and a pedigree. The chervil is worth noting: it is one of the fines herbes, and more used in Belgium and France than in Britain. Sweating aromatics in butter and then pouring the purée onto them is a common Franco-Belgian finishing step for a soup that has already been cooked through.