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Parisian Soup
Cut four leeks into strips, fry them in a little butter at the bottom of a stewpan, pour over one quart of well-seasoned mutton stock, add six or seven boiled potatoes cut into slices, and season with pepper and salt to taste. Boil all together until the leeks are thoroughly done. Fry a few crusts of bread, put them in the tureen and pour the soup over.
A leek-and-potato soup of the plainest sort, built on mutton stock rather than chicken or veal. Nothing here is difficult; the variables are the stock and how far you cook the leeks down.
- Mutton stockGenuine mutton stock is hard to buy and strongly flavoured. A good lamb stock is the closest match; a light beef or chicken stock will work but gives a much milder soup than intended.
- Quantity and yieldOne quart of stock with four leeks and six or seven potatoes is thick — closer to a stew than a broth. It serves three or four as a first course, and you may want a second half-cup of stock to loosen it.
- Sweat, don't fry"Fry them in a little butter" means soften over gentle heat until limp and sweet, roughly 8–10 minutes. Colouring the leeks turns the soup brown and slightly bitter.
- Clean the leeks properlyGrit sits between the layers and will not wash out of a whole leek. Split them lengthways before cutting into strips and rinse under running water.
- The potatoes are already cookedThey go in boiled and sliced, so the final boil is only long enough to finish the leeks — 10 to 15 minutes. Longer and the slices collapse into the broth, which is not the texture the recipe wants.
- StewpanSimply a deep, straight-sided saucepan with a lid. Any 3-quart saucepan does the job.
- The fried crustsBread fried in butter. Put them in the tureen or the individual bowls at the last moment; they soften within a minute or two of the soup going over them.
- SeasoningPotato absorbs a great deal of salt. Season at the end rather than the beginning, especially if the stock was reduced.
Leeks, potatoes and broth is one of the oldest configurations in French domestic cooking, and by the time Oscar Tschirky was compiling recipes at the Waldorf it had been formalised at the grand end as potage parmentier — named for Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the agronomist generally credited with persuading the French to eat potatoes in the late eighteenth century. What makes this version interesting is the mutton stock, a reminder that mutton was a workaday meat in American and British kitchens around 1900 in a way it no longer is, and that hotel kitchens kept several distinct stocks going at once rather than defaulting to chicken. The fried crusts at the bottom of the tureen are older still: bread in the bowl is the original meaning of soupe, which named the sop before it named the liquid poured over it.