Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Bonne Femme Soup
Bonne Femme Soup
Wash and chop four heads of lettuce finely, and put them into a saucepan with one finely chopped cucumber, one teacupful of chopped chervil leaves, and a small lump of butter, with grated nutmeg, salt and pepper to taste. Place the lid on the saucepan, and allow the contents to cool quickly for ten minutes or so; then stir in one tablespoonful of flour; pour in gradually three to four pints of veal stock, and stir it over the fire until boiling. Move the saucepan to the side of the fire, and let the soup simmer gently for half an hour. Beat the yolks of six eggs with one-half pint of cream and two teaspoonfuls of sugar, and stir it by degrees into the soup. Pour the soup into a tureen, and serve with either sippets of toast or croutons of fried bread.
A nineteenth-century lettuce soup finished with a yolk-and-cream liaison. Two things in the text need reading carefully before you start: the direction to "cool" the vegetables, and the point at which the eggs go in.
- "Allow the contents to cool quickly"Almost certainly a compositor's error for cook. With butter, a lid and no liquid, this is a standard sweat: 10 minutes over low heat until the lettuce collapses and gives up its water, with no colour.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the yolks and cream go in, the soup must never boil. Temper by whisking a ladle of hot soup into the egg mixture first, return it off the heat, and bring it back only to about 180F, stirring, until it coats a spoon. Boiling will scramble the yolks and leave the soup grainy.
- TeacupfulA teacup in this period is usually reckoned at somewhere between about 4 and 6 fl oz, so on the order of half to three-quarters of a cup of chopped chervil leaves, loosely packed. That is a great deal of chervil by modern prices; half flat-leaf parsley with chervil for the anise note is a reasonable substitution, though not the original.
- LettuceThe recipe does not say which lettuce; four heads most likely means the soft-headed sort, smaller than a modern iceberg. Reckon on the order of a couple of pounds of trimmed leaves. Romaine works; iceberg is too watery and too bland.
- Veal stockUnsalted white veal stock, not a browned brown stock. Veal bones are still sold at good butchers, but a light unsalted chicken stock gives a close result. Three to four pints is 6 to 8 cups.
- The flourOne tablespoon into three or four pints is barely a thickener; it may be there chiefly to steady the liaison. Cook it in the buttery vegetables for a minute before the stock goes in so it does not taste raw.
- The sugarTwo teaspoons in this volume is seasoning, not sweetening. It lifts the lettuce, which turns faintly bitter when cooked. Leave it in.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of toast. Serve them alongside rather than in the tureen so they stay crisp.
- YieldEight to ten first-course servings. The soup does not reheat well once the yolks are in; make it to serve.
Soupe bonne femme means "good wife's soup" and in French usage signals something plain and domestic rather than a codified dish. The name is usually attached to a leek and potato soup, but through the nineteenth century it was applied loosely to any thrifty vegetable soup built on what the garden gave up, and lettuce versions like this one do turn up in period French and Anglo-French cookery, where cooked lettuce was a respectable vegetable rather than a salad-only leaf. The finish here, egg yolks beaten with cream and stirred in off the boil, is the classic liaison and marks the recipe as belonging to the restaurant tradition Oscar Tschirky worked in: a humble country name over a technique that requires an attentive hand at the stove. Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel from 1893, was not himself a chef, and his book gathers the kitchen's working repertoire, which is why the instructions read as notes for someone who already knows what a liaison is.