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Lettuce Soup
Cool and press out all the water from about two dozen blanched lettuces, cut them down the centres without entirely separating, dust over salt and pepper, and place them in a saucepan with half a pint of veal broth, and the same of rich fowl consomme, add a small bunch of parsley, a clove, one onion, one carrot, and a little thyme and bay leaf. Cover with a sheet of buttered paper, place the lid on the pan, and boil the lettuce gently for two hours. Take them out, drain on a cloth, cut them into halves, place them in a soup tureen, pour in the strained stock in which they were cooked, together with three pints more of boiling broth, and serve with pieces of toast floating on the top.
A braise dressed up as a soup: the lettuce is stewed in a very small amount of stock, then the tureen is flooded with hot broth at the last moment. Scale it down before you start.
- "Blanched" lettuceHere it means lettuce dropped briefly into boiling salted water and then refreshed in cold water, which is why the next instruction is to press out the water. It does not mean the pale, etiolated heads that nineteenth-century gardeners also called blanched.
- Which lettuce, and how manyTwo dozen heads points to hotel-scale service, though the recipe never states how many it feeds; the total liquid comes to about eight cups. Romaine or Little Gem hearts hold their shape best; loose-leaf types dissolve. For four people, six hearts and a quarter of the liquids is a sensible proportion.
- The liquid measuresHalf a pint is one cup, so the braise itself uses only two cups of liquid in total for the whole two dozen heads. That is deliberate. The three pints of boiling broth added at the end is six cups and is the actual soup.
- Veal broth and fowl consommeSubstitute a light unseasoned veal or beef stock and a clear chicken stock. Both should be unsalted or barely salted, since they reduce hard under the lid and are then seasoned again in the tureen.
- Buttered paperA cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the pan's diameter, buttered on the underside and laid directly on the lettuce. It keeps the tops moist in a shallow braising liquid and stops them browning.
- Two hours is too longWith so little liquid this is a gentle oven-style braise rather than a boil, but even so the hearts are tender in 30 to 45 minutes at a bare simmer. Two hours turns them to grey threads and there is a real risk of the pan going dry.
- Strain, and tasteDiscard the parsley, clove, onion, carrot, thyme and bay before they go anywhere near the tureen. The reduced braising liquid is intensely savoury; add it to the fresh broth gradually and season only at that point.
- The toastThin slices well dried out in a low oven rather than soft toast, which sinks. Serve at once: the point of the dish is hot clear broth against warm lettuce, and it does not hold.
Braised lettuce, laitues braisees, was standard French kitchen work long before it reached the Waldorf, usually served as a vegetable garnish for veal or lamb; turning it into a soup by drowning the braised hearts in consomme is the same logic that produced clear soups garnished with stuffed cabbage or braised celery. Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is full of these hotel-scale constructions, where a dish is assembled from two or three separately made stocks and finished in the tureen. The recipe also reflects a practical seasonal fact: lettuce that has begun to bolt or that arrived in the kitchen in quantity is far better braised than served raw, and cooked lettuce appears in Anglo-American and French household books throughout the period for exactly that reason.