No. 307

Fermiere Style Soup

Potage a la Fermiere

Have four medium sized onions, four ounces of leeks, half a cabbage, suppressing the core, three-quarters of a pound of potatoes, four ounces of turnips, half a pound of carrots and four ounces of celery, all minced up very fine, also some minced lettuce. Put one pound of scraped fat pork into a saucepan on the fire, and when hot, add the minced onions and leeks; fry for two minutes, and throw in the other vegetables and cook them without letting them get brown. Sprinkle over four spoonfuls of flour, let cook and a few minutes after, dilute with four quarts of stock; stir the whole until it boils, then add a bunch of parsley garnished with bay leaf, four ounces of string beans cut lozenge shape, and two ounces of raw ham cut in one-eighth inch squares; boil again for three-quarters of an hour, and then add a handful of chopped up sorrel, and a little minced chervil; season with salt and pepper, remove the parsley, season to taste, and pour the soup into a soup tureen over slices of toasted bread or else slices of buttered bread browned in the oven.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A French farmhouse vegetable soup scaled for a professional kitchen: four quarts, finished in the tureen over toast. The method is sound as written, but two of Ranhofer's quantities and several of his ingredient terms need translating.

The hinge: do not let the vegetables colourThe instruction to cook them "without letting them get brown" is the whole character of the soup. Keep the heat moderate and stir; any caramelisation turns a pale, sweet farmhouse broth into something closer to onion soup.
Scraped fat porkMost likely salt pork or fatback, scraped to a soft paste so it renders quickly and evenly; Ranhofer does not specify further. A full pound against four quarts of stock gives a very rich soup by current tastes; 4 to 6 ounces renders more than enough fat to sweat the vegetables, and you can skim the surface before serving.
Four spoonfuls of flourA plain "spoonful" in period cookbooks is generally read as a tablespoon, which would make this roughly a quarter cup. It gives the soup body rather than a true thickness. Let it cook a minute or two in the fat before the stock goes in or the soup tastes pasty.
Sorrel and chervilBoth go in at the end for a reason: sorrel collapses to a khaki purée and loses its acidity if boiled, and chervil's aniseed note vanishes with heat. Sorrel is a farmers' market item; a squeeze of lemon plus spinach is the usual substitute, though it is not the same thing. Chervil can be replaced by flat parsley with a pinch of tarragon.
Raw hamUncooked cured ham -- prosciutto, jambon de Bayonne, speck. Two ounces in eighth-inch dice is a seasoning, not a garnish, and it will salt the pot, so hold back on salt until the end as the recipe directs.
Lozenge shapeDiamond cuts, made by slicing the beans on a sharp diagonal. Purely visual, and worth doing since the beans are the only element with any definition left after 45 minutes.
The bunch of parsley garnished with bayA bouquet garni: parsley stems tied with a bay leaf, pulled out before serving. Tie it with kitchen string so you can find it in four quarts of soup.
Cooking timeThree-quarters of an hour at a bare simmer suits the period, when the vegetables were meant to melt into the broth. If you want the carrot and turnip to hold their shape, 25 to 30 minutes is enough, with the potatoes added partway.
Yield and servingFour quarts serves 12 to 16 as a first course. The toast goes in the tureen and the soup is poured over it; it softens quickly, so serve at once, or set the bread in individual bowls instead.

A Little History

Potage a la fermiere -- farmer's-wife soup -- belongs to the family of French garden-vegetable potages that includes paysanne and bonne femme, all of them built on whatever roots and greens the kitchen garden gave up, softened in pork fat and bound with a little flour. That Charles Ranhofer, chef of Delmonico's, included it in The Epicurean (1894) says something about how the grand American restaurant kitchen worked: the book runs to well over a thousand recipes, and rustic potages sit alongside truffled quail because a full carte needed a plain soup as much as a luxurious one. The tell that this is a professional version rather than an actual farmhouse one is the detail -- beans cut in lozenges, ham in eighth-inch squares, sorrel and chervil added at the last moment -- refinements no one imposes on a pot of soup they are making for their own family. The habit of pouring soup over bread in the tureen is far older than the recipe, and the word soup shares a root with sop, the soaked bread it was poured onto.