Home › French Recipes › Green Soup
Green Soup
2 slices bread
2 bunches watercress
2 diced potatoes
2 tablespoons butter
2 hard-cooked egg-yolks
Cook the watercress until almost done, then add potatoes and purée cook until they are soft. Press through a sieve and add the slightly in to the water in which it was cooked. Brown the bread slightly in the one tablespoon of the butter, and cut into small cubes. Add to the minced egg-yolks and the remaining tablespoon of butter to the . soup, season to taste, add the cubes of bread and serve hot
The text has been mangled somewhere between the typesetter and the scanner, with clauses transposed and the liquid quantity missing entirely. The dish underneath is plain enough: a watercress and potato purée, finished with butter and sieved egg yolk and garnished with fried bread.
- Read the method in the right orderAs printed, the potatoes go in after the cress and the sieving instruction collides with the crouton instruction. The workable sequence is: simmer the diced potatoes until nearly tender, add the watercress for the last few minutes, sieve or blend, return to the cooking water.
- The liquid is not statedNo quantity of water or stock is given. About 3 cups for two bunches of cress and two potatoes gives a soup rather than a purée; a light stock in place of plain water is an improvement, though the recipe says nothing either way.
- Do not cook the cress longThis is the hinge. Watercress held at a simmer for more than three or four minutes turns olive-drab and bitter, and the soup is named for its colour. Add it at the end, cook briefly, and purée at once.
- A bunch of watercressRoughly 3 to 4 oz as sold, or about 4 packed cups of leaves and fine stems. Discard only the thickest stalks; the thinner ones are worth keeping.
- Sieve or blenderA sieve was the usual route to a smooth purée in 1900. A blender does it in seconds, though passing the result through a fine strainer afterwards catches the stringy cress stems.
- The egg yolks are a garnish, not a liaisonThey are hard-cooked and minced, then stirred in off the heat along with the second tablespoon of butter. They are not tempered into the soup to thicken it, and the soup should not boil after they go in.
- CroutonsTwo slices of bread cut into small cubes and browned in a tablespoon of butter. Do this in a separate pan and add them at the table, or they soften before the soup reaches anyone.
- Seasoning and yieldSalt, pepper, and a little lemon or vinegar to lift the cress. As written it serves two generously or four as a first course.
This is potage cressonnière in its plainest form. Watercress was a genuinely cheap green in 1900, grown commercially in shallow running water and sold in tied bunches, so a soup built on cress, two potatoes and yesterday's bread cost almost nothing. The finish of butter and sieved hard-cooked yolk is an old French garnish, related to the mimosa treatment given to salads and cold eggs, and it does the double duty of enriching a thin soup and dressing it up. The transposed phrases and bad line breaks look like a typesetting or scanning fault rather than the cook's.