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Flemish Soup
Put an equal quantity of carrots, onions and turnips cut into small pieces in a saucepan, with a head of lettuce, two leeks, a head of endive, a little chervil and a lump of butter, one-half pint of either mutton or beef broth; boil all gently till tender, stirring now and then, then pour in two quarts of boiling broth, season it with pepper, salt and sugar and let it simmer for two hours. Beat the yolks of three eggs with one-half pint of cream, stir it in with the soup, turn into a tureen and serve.
A classic vegetable soup finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. The original assumes a cook who already knows how much a soup pot holds, so the quantities need pinning down and the hinge is the last step.
- The liaison must not boilOnce the yolks and cream go in, keep the soup below a simmer — around 175F. Egg yolks set from about 150F, and a boil will scramble them into threads that no straining will fix. Temper the yolk-cream mixture with a ladle of hot soup first, then stir it back off the heat.
- QuantitiesNothing is given for the root vegetables beyond "an equal quantity." For two quarts of broth, figure about 6 oz each of carrot, onion and turnip, diced small. A "lump of butter" here is roughly 2 tablespoons.
- Half a pintA US half-pint is one cup (8 fl oz). So one cup of broth for the initial sweat, and one cup of cream for the finish. Three yolks to a cup of cream is a rich liaison; two will do if you want the soup lighter.
- "Boil all gently till tender"This first stage is really a sweat — the small amount of broth and the butter soften the vegetables and draw out sweetness without browning. Fifteen to twenty minutes covered, over low heat, stirring as instructed.
- Two hours is too longLong simmers are common in soup recipes of this period, whatever the reason. With a good broth, 30 to 40 minutes after the boiling broth goes in is enough; beyond that the lettuce and endive turn grey and the carrots go to mush.
- Endive and chervilA "head of endive" in this period most likely means curly endive (frisee) rather than the pale Belgian chicon; either works, and frisee adds a faint bitterness against the sugar. Chervil is delicate and loses its anise note with long cooking — add half at the start and the rest in the final minute.
- The sugarA pinch, not a spoonful. It is there to lift the turnip and leek, not to sweeten the soup, and it is easy to overshoot.
- YieldAbout two and a half quarts finished, serving six to eight as a first course. Serve it as soon as the liaison is in; it does not reheat without splitting.
Soups of this type — root vegetables and greens sweated in butter, extended with broth and bound at the last moment with yolks and cream — resemble the *potage santé* and *potage flamande* of nineteenth-century French kitchen practice. Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, was not a chef by training but compiled his 1896 book from the hotel's kitchen repertoire, and its soup chapter reads as a survey of what a large American hotel of the 1890s expected to be able to produce on demand: dozens of near-identical vegetable potages distinguished chiefly by which garnish or nationality they were assigned. The egg-and-cream finish, a *liaison à l'oeuf*, was one of the marks of a refined soup, and it is the detail that most clearly dates the recipe.