No. 253

Cream Chiffonnade with Cruste or of Leeks with Quenelles

Creme Chiffonnade aux Croutes ou de Poireaux aux Quenelles

Prepare one pound and a quarter of lettuce leaves, eight ounces of sorrel leaves, three ounces of water-cress, and one ounce of chervil leaves, all well washed in several waters, and cut up very fine. Put half a pound of butter into a saucepan, and when very hot, add the herbs, and allow them to fry without attaining a color, then moisten with two quarts of veal stock or white broth, and boil for one-half hour, adding a quart of veloute (No. 415), and a thickening of four egg-yolks, one gill of cream and two ounces of butter for each quart of soup; strain through a sieve, and season with salt, red pepper and nutmeg. Serve a garnishing of round shaped bread crusts seven-eighths by one-eighth of an inch, sprinkled over with butter and browned in the oven.

For the Cream of Leeks, have two pounds of the white part of leeks, prepared and finished as for the chiffonnade, but instead of round bread croutons, replace these by a garnishing of chicken quenelles (No. 89).

← No. 252 Cream of Celery or Cardoons a la Livingstone Soups & Broths No. 254 Cream of Cucumbers a la Sheppard →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a hotel brigade, so the quantities are large and the cross-references assume you have velouté and quenelle forcemeat already made. The soup itself is a simple thing: greens sweated in butter, moistened, thickened, finished with a yolk-and-cream liaison.

The liaison must not boilOnce the four yolks, cream and butter go in, the soup is held below a simmer — around 180F. Boiling after the liaison curdles the yolks and the soup turns grainy past repair. Temper the yolk mixture with a ladle of hot soup before it goes into the pot.
A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. Note that the thickening quantity is given per quart of soup, not for the whole pot: with two quarts of stock plus a quart of velouté you are looking at roughly twelve yolks, three gills of cream and six ounces of butter.
Velouté, No. 415Veloute, No. 415 -- A white roux sauce moistened with veal or chicken stock. About a quart of a light veloute does the same work here; it supplies the body, alongside the yolk-and-cream thickening and the sieved greens.
Red pepperCayenne, used sparingly for warmth rather than heat. In American cookbooks of this period the term generally denoted cayenne rather than paprika or chile flake.
Sorrel and metalSorrel is high in oxalic acid and will pick up a metallic taste from bare aluminium or unlined cast iron. Use stainless or enamelled pans, and expect the greens to go drab olive within a minute of hitting the hot butter — that colour loss is normal and unavoidable in this style of soup.
Half a pound of butterFor a quart-scale batch at home, sweat the greens in three to four ounces. The full half pound is proportioned to the three quarts of finished soup the recipe produces.
The croutonsRounds seven-eighths of an inch across and an eighth thick -- small discs from a thin-sliced loaf, cut with a piping tip or small cutter. The recipe says only to butter them and brown them in the oven; a moderate oven, around 375F, will do it in five to eight minutes. Add them at the table so they stay crisp.
The leek versionTwo pounds of trimmed white parts, sliced thin and sweated the same way, then garnished with poached chicken quenelles instead of bread. Leeks want longer in the butter than the leaf version — eight to ten minutes covered, without browning.
YieldAbout three quarts finished, or ten to twelve cups as a first course.

A Little History

Chiffonnade means simply "made of rags" — the fine shreds of lettuce and sorrel that give this soup its name and its body. The dish belongs to the family of French potages built on garden greens rather than roots, and the pairing of lettuce with sorrel is the classic one: sorrel's acidity keeps the sweetness of the braised lettuce from going flat. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for more than thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 as an encyclopedic record of that kitchen, and its habit of naming dishes for patrons explains why the surrounding soups carry names like Livingstone and Sheppard. That two quite different soups share one entry here is characteristic of the book's logic: they are the same procedure — greens or leeks softened in butter, moistened, enriched with velouté and a yolk liaison — distinguished chiefly by the garnish, croutons in one case and chicken quenelles in the other. The instruction to wash the leaves "in several waters" is a reminder that market greens of the period arrived with a good deal of the field still attached.