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Pomeranian Soup
Put one quart of red haricot beans in a saucepan of water with a lump of salt, and boil them until soft. Drain the beans, put half of them on a wire sieve, and rub them through with the back of a wooden spoon. Put the mashed beans into a saucepan, and stir in gradually sufficient broth to make the soup, which will be three or four pints. A head of celery cut small and previously boiled in soup will greatly improve the flavor. Put in a small bunch of parsley, and sweet herbs and the whole beans, season to taste with pepper and salt, and boil all for fifteen minutes or a little longer. Remove the bunch of herbs from the soup, pour it into a tureen, and serve it with sippets of toast or croutons of fried bread.
A dried-bean puree thickened with its own solids rather than flour, from the Waldorf's German-leaning repertoire. It is simple cooking, but the quantities are large and one or two of the terms have shifted.
- Red haricot beans"Haricot" here just means a shell bean of the common kidney family; red haricots are closest to what a market would now sell as red kidney beans. A dry quart by volume is roughly 1 3/4 to 2 lb.
- Scale and yieldTwo pounds of dried beans makes a great deal of soup; note that the three or four pints named is the finished volume, not broth added on top of the beans. The recipe halves without difficulty.
- Soaking is assumed, not statedSoaking is not mentioned -- Many period recipes direct an overnight soak, and this one appears to assume it. Unsoaked kidney beans will want well over two hours of simmering; soaked, they are soft in about an hour to ninety minutes.
- Salt in the cooking waterThe "lump of salt" is fine. The old warning that salt toughens bean skins does not hold up; lightly salted cooking water seasons the beans from the inside.
- Rubbing through the sieveThe point of pressing half the beans through a sieve is to leave the skins behind, which a blender will not do. A food mill or a tamis gives the smooth body the recipe is after; if you use a blender, pass the puree through a strainer afterwards.
- A head of celeryThis means the whole bunch, not a single rib. The recipe offers it as an optional improvement rather than an instruction, but boiling it in the broth first adds much of the soup's aroma.
- The final boilFifteen minutes is for marrying the puree, broth and herbs, not for cooking anything. Stir often and keep it at a bare simmer: thick bean puree scorches on the bottom of the pan quickly.
- SippetsSmall triangles or cubes of toast, served alongside or floated on top. The recipe's alternative is croutons of fried bread, the richer option.
Pomerania — the Baltic coastal region whose territory passed over the centuries among several powers, including Prussia, Poland, Sweden and Brandenburg — was bean, pea and root-vegetable country. Oscar Tschirky, who came to the Waldorf as ma tre d'h tel in 1893 and whose Cook Book appeared in 1896, was Swiss-born, and a soup like this sat comfortably beside the French classics on the same page. The technique — sieving half the beans for body and leaving the rest whole for texture — is the standard pur he mechanical blenders made thickening an easier problem, and it still gives a better mouthfeel than either flour or a food processor.