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Carrot Puree
Chop very finely all the red portions of some carrots; fry them in butter, and finish cooking by adding a little broth; when done, reduce the broth to a glaze, stir in six tablespoonfuls of bechamel sauce, and strain through a sieve. Mix with this puree five or six pints of white broth, then pass it all through a sieve into a saucepan, place it on the fire, and stir until it begins to bubble; then move it on one side of the stove and leave for an hour to settle. Skim off all the fat from the broth, and thicken it with a mixture of four egg yolks, diluted with cream and poured through a sieve; and then place the soup over the fire again, stirring in a few tablespoonfuls of blanched noodles and a lump of butter. When the soup is hot, pour it into a soup tureen, and serve.
Despite the title, this is a soup in the classical French manner — a carrot purée let down with white stock and finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. The one thing that will ruin it is heat: once the yolks go in, the soup must never bubble again.
- The liaison is the hingeAfter the egg yolks and cream are added, hold the soup between 160 and 180F and stir constantly. A single boil scrambles the yolks and the soup turns grainy past saving. Temper the yolk-cream mixture with a ladle of hot soup before it goes into the pot.
- "The red portions of some carrots"This means the outer orange flesh. Old carrot varieties had a pale, woody core that was cut away because it stayed fibrous and tasted flat. Modern carrots are bred without much of one, so use them whole unless the core is visibly pale and tough.
- White brothAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock, made from bones and aromatics with no roasting or caramelizing. Any light chicken stock works; a dark or heavily reduced stock will bury the carrot.
- ScaleFive or six pints of broth makes roughly ten to twelve servings. For four people use about a pint and a half of stock, a tablespoon and a half of béchamel, one egg yolk and a quarter cup of cream; the recipe gives no carrot quantity, but about a pound is a reasonable starting point.
- BéchamelSix tablespoons of a standard flour-and-butter white sauce, made fairly thick. It is here as a stabilizer as much as a thickener, and it makes the later egg liaison more forgiving.
- The hour to settleOff direct heat, the fat rises to the top so it can be skimmed and any solids drop. Keep the pan warm rather than cold, and skim thoroughly, or the finished soup will taste greasy. Refrigerating overnight and lifting the set fat off is easier.
- Two sievingsThe first strains the glazed carrot and béchamel; the second strains the whole thinned soup. A food mill or blender followed by one pass through a fine chinois gets you there faster with the same texture.
- Blanched noodlesFine egg noodles or vermicelli, boiled separately in salted water and drained so their starch does not cloud the soup. Add them at the last minute — they will keep softening in the hot liquid.
- Reducing to a glazeCook the broth down around the carrots until it coats them and the pan is nearly dry. This concentrates the sweetness and is the difference between a carrot soup and a soup with carrots in it.
A carrot purée thinned with white stock is the classical potage Crécy, named for one of the French towns — usually Crécy-en-Ponthieu or Crécy-la-Chapelle — long known for its carrots, though which one claims the dish is traditional rather than settled; the egg-yolk liaison here is a finish rather than a defining feature of the dish. Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, but the book bearing his name works in this Escoffier-era French idiom, where a "purée" and a "potage" shade into each other and a soup might be sieved twice, skimmed, and finished with a liaison of yolk and cream at the last moment. The egg-yolk finish, called simply a liaison, turns up often in soups of this period; it gives a body and gloss that cream cannot manage on its own, at the cost of a cook who has to watch the pot.