Important: Safety Warning

This page offers rules for telling edible mushrooms from poisonous ones. No such rules are reliable, and these identifications predate modern mycology. Deadly species closely resemble edible ones, and mistakes are regularly fatal. Never eat a wild mushroom on the strength of this text.

This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.

No. 297

Chartreuse Soup

Potage a la Chartreuse

Boil up two quarts of clarified veal broth; put into it four or five spoonfuls of French tapioca, and let cook together for twenty-five or thirty minutes; strain, and return it to the saucepan on the side of the range. Prepare with some thinly rolled out raviole paste (No. 147), four or five dozen small ravioles, filling them with three different preparations; one-third of them with a good puree of spinach, one-third with a puree or cooked foies-gras combined with a little melted beef extract, and the other third with finely chopped up fresh oronge-agaric, thickened with a little reduced sauce, or should there be no oronge-agaric then use cepes or peeled mushrooms. Plunge into boiling water four or five not over ripe tomatoes; drain them as soon as the skin peels off, and press them through a tammy, and if the puree be too thin, then let it drain on a fine sieve, reserving the liquid, and putting it into a saucepan with some good veal stock and reduce it to a half glaze. Cook the ravioles slowly in salted water for twelve to fifteen minutes with the cover on, then drain, and lay them in the soup tureen. Remove the soup from off the fire, mix it in with the puree of raw tomatoes, season, and pour it over the ravioles.

← No. 296 Champetre Soup Soups & Broths No. 298 Chicken and Leek Soup →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A composed consommé from Ranhofer's Delmonico's kitchen: clear veal broth thickened with tapioca, poured over three kinds of tiny ravioli. Most of the work is in the filling, and the whole thing can be ruined in the last thirty seconds.

The hinge: the tomato goes in off the heatThe raw tomato purée is stirred into the broth only after the pan leaves the fire, and the recipe never has it reheated. Boiling it again would cook out the fresh acidity and dull the colour.
Clarified veal brothI.e. a consommé: veal stock clarified in the usual period manner, with egg white and lean ground meat, then strained through cloth. Two quarts would serve roughly six to eight as a first course. Unclarified stock will look muddy against the tomato.
French tapiocaFine pearl tapioca, not the large boba pearls and not instant. Four or five spoonfuls to two quarts gives a barely perceptible body; the twenty-five to thirty minutes is right for pearls that must go fully translucent, after which the soup is strained anyway.
Oronge-agaricAmanita caesarea, the Caesar's mushroom, prized in France and Italy and effectively unbuyable in the United States. It has lethal look-alikes among its own genus, so unless a trusted forager hands it to you, take Ranhofer's own alternative and use cèpes (porcini) or cultivated mushrooms.
Beef extractThe dark, salty meat concentrate sold as Liebig's or Bovril. A teaspoon or so of glace de viande does the same job in the foie gras filling; if you substitute a bouillon cube, cut the salt elsewhere.
TammyA woollen or fine cloth strainer, worked by twisting. A fine chinois or a sieve lined with muslin gives the same seedless, skinless tomato purée.
A loose end in the originalThe tomato liquid reduced with veal stock "to a half glaze" — demi-glace consistency — is never explicitly put back into anything. The likeliest reading is that it is the "little reduced sauce" used to thicken the mushroom filling; adding it there rather than to the finished soup is the safer course.
Ravioli size and cookingFour or five dozen means truly small ravioli, spoon-sized, so they sit in the bowl rather than dominating it. Twelve to fifteen minutes at a bare simmer with the lid on suits pasta rolled thin around a cold cooked filling; taste one before draining, since modern flour and a thinner roll may be done sooner.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this soup shows the house style: a clear broth used as a frame for small, laboriously made garnishes. The name is a French kitchen convention rather than a description — à la chartreuse is generally traced to the Carthusian monks and their meatless cookery, and by the nineteenth century it had come to signal a dish built up of neatly arranged vegetable elements, most famously the moulded chartreuse de perdreaux. Here the reference is to the three-coloured trio of fillings, though the foie gras and beef extract have long since left any monastic idea behind. The tapioca is worth noticing too: imported cassava pearl reached fashionable European and American kitchens in the nineteenth century as a way of giving a consommé faint body without the cloudiness of flour, and Ranhofer uses it in a whole series of clear soups.