Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Puree of Herbs with Vegetables
Puree of Herbs with Vegetables
Wash a savoy cabbage, slice it and place it in a stewpan with two sliced leeks and a little butter; let them fry for an hour, put with them four sliced heads of cabbage lettuce, one small sized beet root, one handful each of borage leaves, and sorrel, and one pinch of chervil. When the herbs are done, sprinkle over one tablespoonful of flour, pour in two quarts of broth, and stir over the fire till it begins to boil. Beat six eggs and one-fourth pint of cream and stir it in the broth. Cut a fourth pound of butter into little bits and add it to the soup.
A French garden-herb soup of the old school, finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. Two things need attention: the eggs, and the fact that the title promises a purée the instructions never explicitly call for.
- The hinge: never boil after the eggs go inBeat the eggs and cream together, temper them with a ladle or two of the hot soup, then stir the mixture back in off direct heat. Hold the pot at 170-180F until it thickens slightly; a boil will scramble the eggs into threads and no amount of whisking recovers it.
- Purée the soup before the liaisonPuree the soup before the liaison -- The title says puree, the method never says so. Blend or pass the vegetables through a sieve or food mill once they are tender in the broth, then bring it back to a bare simmer and add the eggs and cream. Doing it in the other order risks breaking the finished soup, since the egg has to be reheated or agitated again.
- "Fry for an hour" means sweat, not brownAn hour of actual frying will scorch shredded cabbage. Cover the pan, keep the heat low, and let the cabbage and leeks soften in the butter without colour; 25-35 minutes is enough on a modern burner.
- MeasuresA quarter pint of cream is half a cup (US). A quarter pound of butter is one stick, 4 oz, cut cold into small cubes and swirled in off the heat at the very end. Two quarts of broth is eight cups.
- Cabbage lettuceThis is a heading lettuce -- butterhead or Bibb rather than romaine or loose leaf. Four heads sounds enormous but they collapse to almost nothing; use whole heads, cored and shredded.
- Borage and sorrelBorage is a garden or farmers' market item, not a supermarket one; use young leaves, as older ones are unpleasantly bristly. Sorrel is sharply acidic and will turn a drab olive on cooking, which is normal. Cook sorrel in stainless steel or enamel, not bare cast iron or aluminium, which react with the oxalic acid and give a metallic taste.
- The beetOne small beetroot, sliced, tints the soup rather than flavours it. If you would rather keep the green colour of the herbs, leave it out -- it will otherwise pull the purée toward a muddy pink.
- YieldTwo quarts of broth plus the vegetables gives roughly ten cups of finished soup: eight generous first-course servings. Season at the end, after the butter, since the broth and the sorrel both carry salt and acid of their own.
Green herb soups of this kind -- potage aux herbes, or potage santé, the "health soup" -- were standing items in French kitchen repertoires long before Oscar Tschirky assembled his 1896 book at the Waldorf. They belong to an era when a hotel kitchen still expected a supply of borage, sorrel and chervil, herbs grown in kitchen gardens and sold in market bunches rather than shelved in plastic clamshells. The finish is the classic liaison, beaten eggs stirred in off the boil, one of the standard ways of giving body to a soup; the tablespoon of flour here is only a token thickener by comparison. That Oscar prints it at all is a reminder that the Waldorf's kitchen was a French kitchen, staffed and organised on Continental lines, whatever the American room service menu said.