No. 323

Marshall Soup

Potage a la Marshall

Make a garnishing of stuffed cucumbers, by peeling three small cucumbers, divide them crossways into parts each a quarter of an inch high, and blanch the pieces for fifteen minutes in salted water, then drain, cut out the center with a three-quarter inch column tube, so as to remove the seeds; fill the insides with a raw fine herb quenelle forcemeat (No. 89), and range them in a saucepan garnished with salt pork; moisten them with broth, add some salt, cover with buttered paper, and leave them to cook slowly. Despumate on the side of the fire two quarts of consomme, thickening it with two dessertspoonfuls of fecula diluted in two gills of Madeira wine; pour the soup into a soup tureen and serve the cucumbers at the same time, but in a separate vegetable dish.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A clear consommé barely thickened with starch and Madeira, served with braised stuffed cucumber rings alongside. The whole thing lives or dies on the consommé, since there is nowhere for a weak broth to hide.

DespumateIt means to skim: hold the consommé at a bare tremble at the side of the stove and lift off the scum and fat as it rises. Boiling hard will cloud the soup, which defeats the purpose of the dish.
FeculaPotato starch, though arrowroot or cornstarch behave much the same here. Two dessertspoonfuls is roughly two rounded teaspoons each, so about 4 teaspoons for two quarts — a light body, not a sauce.
Gills and MadeiraA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of Madeira. Stir the starch into the cold wine, add it to the hot soup, and let it come back to a simmer only briefly; long boiling drives off the wine's aroma and thins the starch again.
Column tubeA straight-sided round cutter three-quarters of an inch across. An apple corer or a large piping tip does the job of coring the cucumber slices.
The fifteen-minute blanchFifteen minutes is a long blanch for rings only a quarter-inch high; the cucumbers of the period were probably thicker, seedier and tougher-skinned than ours, which may be the reason. Modern slicing or English cucumbers can collapse, so three to four minutes in salted water is likely enough, since they still have a slow braise ahead of them.
Quenelle forcemeat No. 89A cross-reference to Ranhofer's own raw fine-herb quenelle forcemeat, which is not reproduced on this page. A modern food-processor mousseline of chicken breast, egg white and cream, well chilled, gives a comparable result and must be cooked through in the braise.
The braiseLine the pan with thin sheets of salt pork or blanched bacon, set the rings upright in a single layer, moisten with broth, and cover with a buttered parchment cartouche rather than a lid, as the recipe directs. Cook at a bare simmer on the stove until the forcemeat is firm — roughly 20 to 25 minutes for rings a quarter-inch high.
Yield and serviceTwo quarts of consomme serves six to eight as a first course. Three small cucumbers sliced into quarter-inch rings will yield well more rings than that number of diners needs. The original serves them alongside in a separate vegetable dish.

A Little History

The recipe comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he assembled from thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it shows the house style exactly: a clear consommé, a lightly bound liaison of starch and fortified wine, and a garnish built by hand and served apart. Names like à la Marshall, Meissonier and the rest were the working currency of nineteenth-century restaurant French — some honoured patrons, some artists, some are simply catalogue labels whose subject is now unrecoverable, and Ranhofer, like his contemporaries, rarely explains them. What the dish does record is the older sense of cucumber as a cooked vegetable rather than a salad one: blanched, cored, stuffed with forcemeat and braised on pork, a treatment shared with the stuffed cucumber entremets found in French kitchen manuals from Carême's generation onward.