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Potage Leman
Make a good gravy with one and one-half pounds of skirt of beef. With one half of the gravy make a very good puree of peas--if possible the green peas--with the other half make a good puree of tomatoes. Combine the two purees, adding pepper and salt and a dust of cayenne. For each guest add to the soup a teaspoonful of Madeira wine, beat it all well and serve quickly. Or add, instead of Madeira, one dessertspoonful of sherry wine. This celebrated soup is honored by the name of the glorious defender of Namur.
A two-purée soup built on a single beef broth, split and reunited. The only real technical demand is that the two halves finish at the same consistency so they combine smoothly.
- "Gravy" means brothIn this period a gravy is the strained, well-reduced liquid from simmered meat, not a thickened sauce. Simmer the beef, skim, strain and divide; the recipe gives no quantities, but something like 2 quarts of water reduced over two to three hours suits the rest of the proportions.
- Skirt of beefBritish butchery: skirt covers the diaphragm and adjoining abdominal muscles (thin skirt, goose skirt), sold today as skirt or flank. Any well-flavoured stewing cut of 1.5 lb gives the same result; the recipe does not say what becomes of the meat, but it is presumably not returned to the soup.
- The peas"If possible the green peas" means fresh shelled peas rather than dried split peas. Fresh peas need only 8-10 minutes in the broth; dried peas need soaking and an hour or more, and will make a much heavier purée that may need thinning.
- Tomato puréeThis is fresh tomatoes stewed down and sieved, not the concentrated tube or tin paste sold under that name today. About 2 lb of ripe tomatoes cooked in the broth and passed through a sieve is the right order of magnitude.
- Sieve or blenderThe original assumes a tamis or hair sieve. A blender does the work faster, but pass the pea purée through a sieve afterwards anyway to catch skins, which otherwise leave the soup grainy.
- Matching the two halvesBring both purées to the same thickness before combining, thinning with reserved broth. Peas thicken far more than tomatoes, so the pea side usually needs the loosening.
- The wineA teaspoon of Madeira per serving, stirred in at the last moment. Prolonged heating after it goes in drives off the aroma it was added for; the recipe's instruction to serve quickly is consistent with that, though it gives no reason.
- YieldThe recipe states no quantity; the proportions suggest roughly 2 quarts, or six to eight servings.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in 1915 from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees in Britain. Leman is generally taken to be Lieutenant-General Gérard Leman, who commanded the fortified position at Liège in August 1914 and was pulled unconscious from the wreckage of Fort Loncin; the book's attribution of him to Namur is a slip, though the two sieges opened within days of each other and were easily conflated by contributors writing from exile without reference books. The soup itself is a piece of ordinary bourgeois cookery dressed for the occasion, and the fashion for naming such potages after generals and battles was well established in French kitchens long before 1914.