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Vegetable Puree (Prepare any kind of vegetables)
Prepare any kind of vegetables, such as potatoes, leeks, carrots, onions, turnips, etc., place them all together in a stewpan with a bunch of sweet herbs, stock to cover them, and salt, pepper and spices to taste, and boil them until they are quite tender; then mash them through a fine hair-sieve. Put two ounces of butter and a tablespoonful of flour in a stewpan, stir it over the fire and then mix in the puree gradually. Stir it again over the fire for a few minutes, then move it to the side and beat in the yolks of two eggs that have been beaten up with a small quantity of milk, and strained. Turn the puree onto a hot dish, garnish it with sippets of toast or croutons of bread that have been fried brown in butter, and serve.
A flexible root-vegetable puree finished with a butter-flour base and an egg liaison. The hinge is the egg: once the yolks go in, the puree must not boil again.
- Do not boil after the eggsThe yolks beaten with milk are a liaison, and they set into grains the moment the puree simmers. Pull the pan well off the heat, temper a ladle of hot puree into the yolks first, then stir the mixture back in and hold it below about 180F just long enough to thicken.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair drum sieve, worked with a wooden mushroom pestle. A food mill on its finest plate or a blender followed by a pass through a chinois gives the same texture with a fraction of the labor.
- Sweet herbsNot sweet in the sugar sense but the mild kitchen herbs: parsley, thyme, bay, sometimes marjoram or a little celery leaf, tied in a bundle and lifted out before sieving. A standard bouquet garni is the direct equivalent.
- Spices to tasteMost likely a scrape of nutmeg or mace and perhaps a little white pepper rather than a warm spice blend. Nutmeg is the one to reach for.
- Stewpan and quantitiesA stewpan is a straight-sided saucepan; any 4-quart pot works. Two ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons, and with only a tablespoon of flour this is a very loose roux whose job is enrichment more than thickening, so cook it a minute without letting it color.
- Stock to coverCover the vegetables by no more than an inch or the puree will be thin. Reserve some of the cooking liquid separately and add it back after sieving to reach the consistency of thick cream.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread. The recipe offers a choice: sippets of toast, or croutons fried brown in butter. Toast cut into points does the same job if you would rather not fry.
- YieldRoughly 2 pounds of mixed vegetables should make about a quart of finished puree, serving four to six as a first course. Serve it immediately; a yolk liaison reheats badly and is liable to curdle.
Purees of this kind sit at the point where the French kitchen's potage purée shades into a vegetable side dish, and the ambiguity is deliberate: thinned with more stock, the same preparation goes into a soup plate. Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel rather than chef at the Waldorf, and his 1896 book gathers the working formulas of a large hotel kitchen, which is why the recipe names no fixed vegetables, even as it is exact about the butter, flour and egg yolks. It assumes a cook with a stockpot always going and whatever roots the larder held that morning. The finish with butter, flour and an egg-and-milk liaison is textbook nineteenth-century French practice, the same thickening logic behind a velouté, and the fried sippets supplied a contrast in texture.