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Flemish Soup
To two pounds of washed and picked Brussels sprouts add ten potatoes, two onions, two leeks, salt, pepper. Cook all gently and pass through a sieve. Add at the last moment a sprinkle of chopped chervil.
A thick sieved vegetable soup with almost no method given. The proportions are sound; the omissions are the cooking liquid and the fat, both of which the original assumes.
- The missing liquidNo quantity of water or stock is stated. For 2 lb sprouts and ten potatoes, start with about 3 quarts of water or light stock, enough to cover generously, and expect a soup that thickens considerably once the potatoes are pureed.
- Ten potatoesAn unspecific measure. Take it as somewhere around 2.5 to 3 lb of floury potatoes, peeled and quartered; these are the thickener, so no flour or roux is wanted.
- "Cook all gently"Sprouts and potatoes go in together in the original, but the sprouts turn sulphurous and grey with long boiling. Simmer potatoes, onions and leeks for about 20 minutes, add the sprouts for the last 10 to 12, then puree.
- Passing through a sieveThis would have been done by hand, pushing the vegetables through with a wooden spoon or pestle. A blender or immersion blender does it in seconds; pass the result through a fine sieve afterwards if you want the smoothness the original implies, since sprout leaves stay fibrous.
- ButterThe recipe names no fat. Sweating the onions and leeks in butter first, and finishing with a knob more or a little cream, suits the soup, though the original does not call for it.
- ChervilAdded off the heat for good reason: its faint anise note is volatile and is quickly lost in boiling. Fresh only; dried chervil tastes of little. Flat parsley with a pinch of tarragon is the nearest substitute.
- YieldSix to eight bowls as a first course, four as a supper with bread.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in Britain in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled the German invasion, and its plainness is the point: these are dishes recalled from ordinary kitchens rather than copied from a professional canon. Brussels sprouts carry the country's name into English by way of the market gardens around Brussels, where the plant is generally traced to cultivation from at least the sixteenth century, and a sieved soup of sprouts, potatoes and leeks is about as Flemish as a pot can get. Chervil deserves attention here too. It was a standard herb in Belgian and northern French cooking, and it survives in that tradition in the Flemish kervelsoep, while in Britain and America it seems to have been much less commonly sold by the time this book appeared.