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Solferino Soup
Put into a saucepan with some clear stock an equal quantity each of new potatoes, string and haricot beans, young carrots and green peas; add a little chopped celery, parsley and chives. Let the soup simmer by the side of the fire till the vegetables are cooked, then put in a little tomato puree and season to taste with pepper and salt. Put some croutons of fried or toasted bread in a soup tureen, pour the soup over them and serve.
A clean vegetable soup that depends entirely on the quality of the stock and on cutting the vegetables so they finish together. The original assumes a coal range with a cooler side; a low burner does the same work.
- "By the side of the fire"This means a bare simmer, not a boil — on a range, the cooler edge of the stovetop. Use the lowest setting that keeps the surface barely trembling, or the peas and beans will turn grey and the potatoes will cloud the stock.
- Equal quantity of eachOscar gives no volumes. Read it as equal parts by prepared volume: about a cup each of diced new potato, string beans, shelled haricots, young carrot and peas to roughly 2 quarts of stock, which yields six to eight servings.
- Haricot beansIn a soup of spring vegetables these are most likely fresh shell beans (flageolet, cranberry or similar) rather than dried ones, though "haricot beans" was also the common term for dried white beans. If you use dried haricots, cook them separately to tenderness first and add them at the end — dropped in raw they will still be hard when everything else has collapsed.
- Staggered timingThe instruction to simmer until "the vegetables are cooked" flattens what are really four different timings. Carrots and potatoes first, then string beans, then peas in the last four or five minutes. Cut everything to a uniform small dice — traditionally small balls cut with a parisienne scoop.
- Tomato puréeIn the 1890s this usually meant sieved cooked fresh tomato, thinner and brighter than modern canned paste. Use passata, or thin tomato paste with a little stock; add only enough to tint the soup rose-pink.
- Chives and parsleyAdd these off the heat, not with the celery at the start. Twenty minutes of simmering takes all the point out of them.
- The croûtonsPutting them in the tureen and pouring over means they soften into the soup. If you prefer them crisp, pass them separately.
Solferino was the last major battle of the Second Italian War of Independence, fought in June 1859, and within a couple of years its name had been given to a vivid purplish-red aniline dye — one of the first synthetic colours, sold alongside magenta, named for another battle in the same campaign. French cooks took up the word as they did Marengo and Magenta, and the association with a particular bright red stuck. A garnish or soup à la Solférino is therefore tomato-tinted, and classically studded with small balls of carrot and potato cut with a scoop. Escoffier's version is a tomato and potato purée with those balls floated in it; Oscar's is the plainer brasserie form, a clear stock full of spring vegetables with just enough tomato to carry the name. Its presence in a Waldorf book is a reminder that even a hotel famous for lobster and terrapin needed a light vegetable soup on the card for the early part of a long menu.