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Vegetable Puree (Wash well a couple of bunches)
Wash well a couple of bunches of young carrots, scrape them thoroughly and rasp off the red parts into a saucepan, add a small quantity of butter and a slice of lean ham, also a few leeks and sticks of celery tied up in a bundle, and stir well over the fire until the vegetables are slightly colored, then pour in the required quantity of fowl or other consomme, and boil slowly for two hours. Take out the roots and ham and strain the soup into another saucepan, rub the carrots through a sieve and add them to the soup, and bring it once more to the boil. Remove the saucepan to the side of the fire, skim the soup carefully, add a small pinch of sugar, pour it into a tureen and serve.
A carrot velvet built on consommé rather than cream or flour, from an era when a "puree" meant vegetable rubbed through a sieve and nothing else. Two points decide whether it works: how you cut the carrots, and how much stock you use, since the original names no quantity.
- "Rasp off the red parts"Rasp means grate on a coarse grater, and "the red parts" is the sweet outer flesh; the paler, woodier core is discarded. On modern hybrid carrots the core is far less fibrous, so grating the whole root is fine, but avoid the tough top inch nearest the crown.
- QuantitiesTwo bunches of young carrots is roughly 1.5 to 2 lb trimmed. The "required quantity" of consommé is left to the cook: about 2 quarts for that weight of carrot gives a soup that coats a spoon without being pasty. Start with less and thin it at the end.
- Cooking timeGrated carrot in stock is soft well within half an hour. The two hours points to a pot left to cook slowly at the back of a range rather than to the time the carrot needs; simmer until the carrot collapses, then reduce further only if you want it thicker.
- The hamA slice of lean ham is seasoning, not an ingredient in the finished soup; it goes in whole and comes out whole. Use a piece of unsmoked or lightly smoked ham or a prosciutto end, and hold back the salt until it has been removed.
- The bundleLeeks and celery tied with string so they can be lifted out in one motion. Two leeks and three celery ribs are ample; tie them tightly or the leek layers separate and you spend the straining fishing for them.
- "Remove to the side of the fire"Off direct heat, where the pot stays hot but stops moving, so fat and scum rise and collect at the surface for skimming. On a modern stove, take it off the burner for five minutes, skim, then reheat.
- Sieve or blenderRubbing through a sieve gives the fine, slightly grainy texture the recipe intends. A blender or immersion blender is faster and smoother; passing the blended soup through a fine strainer once removes the last fibre.
- Yield and serviceAbout 2 quarts on the stock quantity above, serving six to eight as a first course. It is meant to go out plain in a heated tureen; the pinch of sugar may simply be to lift carrots that were not especially sweet, and can be left out if yours are.
Vegetable purees of this kind were the backbone of the soup course in the grand hotel kitchens of the 1890s and 1900s, where a good consomme was already made and waiting, so a puree was simply a vegetable cooked in it and sieved. Purees were classed separately from cream soups and bisques, though the line is not a hard one, since classical purees often took rice or potato as a binder; the French kitchen shorthand for a carrot version was puree Crecy, often said to point to a carrot-growing district, though which Crecy is meant has never been settled. The slice of ham and the tied bundle of leek and celery are the standard hotel devices for building depth without adding anything the diner will see, and the trailing pinch of sugar is a reminder that market carrots before modern breeding could be earthy and thin-flavoured rather than reliably sweet.