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Chervil Soup
Put a bone of veal on to cook in water, with four or five potatoes, according to the quantity desired. When these are tender, pass them through the tammy and return them to the soup. Chop up the chervil, adding to it half a dessertspoonful of cornflour. Quarter of an hour before serving, put in the chervil, but take the cover off the pot, so that it remains a good green color. Pepper and salt to be added also.
A Good Pea Soup Soak your dried peas over-night. The following day boil some fresh water, and throw in the peas, adding a few chopped onions and leeks, with pepper and salt. Let the soup simmer for three hours on the top of the stove, giving it a stir now and then. If you have a ham-bone, that is a great improvement, or the water in which some bacon has been boiled is a good foundation for the soup, instead of the fresh water.
Two soups run together on this page: a chervil soup thickened with potato, and a plain pea soup built on ham water. Both are written for a cook who already knows what a soup pot looks like, so the gaps are worth filling.
- TammyA tammy is a fine woven cloth or sieve used to force soft vegetables through. A food mill, a ricer or a few seconds with a stick blender does the same job; avoid a high-speed blender on potato, which turns it gluey.
- CornflourBritish usage: cornflour is cornstarch, not cornmeal. Half a dessertspoonful is about a teaspoon, and it needs to be slaked in a little cold water or stock before it goes into the pot.
- Quantities to assumeA veal bone of about 1 lb with 4-5 medium potatoes and 2 quarts of water gives roughly six servings. Chervil is unmeasured here; two large handfuls of leaves, loosely packed, is a fair reading for that volume.
- The hinge: chervil goes in lateChervil's aniseed note is volatile and its colour goes drab fast. Fifteen minutes at a simmer is more than it needs; five is plenty, and the uncovered pot in the original is there precisely to let steam escape and keep the green bright.
- The veal boneBones give little on their own in a short cook. Roast the bone first or ask for a marrow or knuckle bone, and give it 2-3 hours at a bare simmer before the potatoes go in, skimming the grey scum in the first ten minutes.
- Chervil is not parsleyIf you cannot find fresh chervil, do not substitute dried, which tastes of nothing. Flat-leaf parsley with a few tarragon leaves is the closest workable stand-in, though the soup becomes a different thing.
- Pea soup: three hours is still rightWhole dried peas soaked overnight genuinely want two to three hours. Split peas collapse in about an hour and need more stirring, as they catch on the bottom once they thicken.
- Bacon waterThe water bacon or ham has boiled in is often aggressively salty. Taste it before using it as the base, dilute with plain water as needed, and hold back the salt until the end.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, and sold to raise money for their relief; that origin explains the book's plainness, since these are household dishes recalled from memory rather than restaurant cooking. Chervil soup — kervelsoep in Flemish, soupe au cerfeuil in the French-speaking provinces — is a spring soup of exactly that domestic kind, made when chervil is one of the first useful green things in the kitchen garden and thickened with whatever potato is to hand. Chervil was far more common in Low Countries and northern French cooking than in British or American kitchens, which is part of why the recipe assumes no explanation of it. The pea soup that follows belongs to the same economy: dried peas kept through the winter, and the cooking water from a piece of bacon standing in for stock, a habit found across northern Europe wherever pork was salted at home.