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Puree of Leeks
Trim and wash the required quantity of leeks, place them in boiling salted water and boil until tender; press the leeks through a fine hair-sieve, place this in a saucepan with a lump of butter, one-half pint of cream and one teaspoonful each of sugar and flour. Stir over the fire and boil until reduced, then thicken it with the beaten yolks of two eggs. Turn the puree on a hot dish, garnish with croutons of fried bread, and serve.
A French-style vegetable puree served as a side dish rather than a soup, despite the cream. Most of the recipe is straightforward; the egg finish is where it can fail.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the beaten yolks go in, the puree must not boil. Take the pan off direct heat, temper the yolks with a ladle of the hot puree, stir them back in, and return it to low heat only until it thickens slightly. A boil will scramble the yolks and leave the puree grainy.
- "The required quantity"Oscar assumes a kitchen cooking to order. For the half pint of cream and two yolks given here, something in the region of 2 to 2 1/2 lb of trimmed leeks would be a reasonable working amount, enough for about four as a side dish.
- Half a pint of creamOne US cup. Probably a rich cream rather than a thin one, given that the puree is reduced, though the recipe says only "cream."
- Hair sieveA fine sieve of woven horsehair, used before food mills. A food mill on the fine plate, or a blender followed by a pass through a fine-mesh sieve, gives the same texture. Leeks are fibrous enough that skipping the sieve leaves strings.
- Washing leeksGrit sits between the layers. Split them lengthwise before washing, or slice and swish in a bowl of water and lift out rather than pouring off.
- The teaspoon of flourA token thickener only. Work it into the softened butter first so it does not lump, and let the puree simmer a few minutes before the yolks go in so the raw flour taste cooks out.
- Boiling the leeksTender means genuinely soft, around 15 to 20 minutes for whole trimmed leeks in salted water. Undercooked leeks will not pass through a sieve cleanly.
- CroutonsSmall dice of bread fried in butter or clarified butter, added at the table so they stay crisp.
Oscar Tschirky, the maitre d'hotel whose name fronts this 1896 volume, was not a cook but he compiled the Waldorf's working repertoire, and much of it is French kitchen practice written down in plain English for American households. A vegetable puree finished with cream and bound with egg yolks is characteristic nineteenth-century French method, the yolk liaison giving a silkier, glossier body than flour alone. Leeks were generally the humbler cousin of the onion in Anglo-American cooking, more often met in soup than on their own, so presenting them as a smooth puree with fried croutons was a way of dressing a cheap winter vegetable to hotel standard. The croutons are not decoration alone; the crunch is the only textural contrast in an otherwise wholly smooth dish.