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Cream of Beetroots
Place in a saucepan a small knuckle veal with three quarts water, boil five minutes, remove water and pour in four quarts fresh water, add two medium carrots, one white onion, one turnip, two leeks, two branches celery, one clove and six good-sized, peeled red beets. Season with two teaspoons salt and half teaspoon pepper. Cover pan and slowly simmer two hours. Mix in a saucepan one ounce butter with two ounces flour; stir while heating one minute. Skim fat from surface of soup, strain through a Chinese strainer into this pan, mix well, pound beets in a mortar, then add again to the soup. Lightly mix and boil thirty-five minutes more. Pour in a half-pint cream, let come to a boil; mix well, strain through a cheesecloth into a soup tureen and serve.
A French-style cream soup rather than a borscht, built on a veal stock and finished twice through a fine strainer. Nothing here is difficult, but the colour and the texture both depend on how the beets are handled at the end.
- The hinge: acid at the finishBeets simmered for well over two hours, then boiled again after the cream, lose their scarlet and drift toward brown-pink. A tablespoon of lemon juice or wine vinegar stirred in near the end helps hold the colour; add it at the very end and off the heat, since acid and hot dairy can break.
- The blanching stepBoiling the veal knuckle five minutes and discarding the water is a scum-removal technique, not waste. It gives a clear stock without constant skimming. Rinse the bone under the tap before returning it to the fresh water.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Any fine sieve works; the second pass through cheesecloth is what gives the soup its smoothness and should not be skipped.
- Weights, not volumesOne ounce butter is 2 tablespoons; two ounces flour is a scant half cup. The roux is flour-heavy in itself, but only a light thickening for this quantity of liquid.
- Half-pint creamOne cup. Use heavy cream; light cream and half-and-half are likelier to break over direct heat.
- Mortar or machinePounding six cooked beets by hand is the original method. A food processor or blender does it in seconds, and since everything is strained afterward, there is no loss.
- TimingThe thirty-five minute boil after the roux goes in is longer than needed to cook out the flour — fifteen minutes is enough. Reduce it if you want a brighter soup, and keep the pot at a bare simmer once the cream is in.
- YieldFour quarts of stock reduced over the course of cooking gives roughly ten to twelve first-course servings. Halve it comfortably.
The treatment is that of the grand-restaurant tradition: the beet arrives not as the peasant vegetable of Eastern Europe but as the flavouring for a potage crème, veal-based, roux-bound, enriched with cream and pushed through cheesecloth until nothing coarse remains. Straining twice is characteristic of professional French service cookery of the period, when a cream soup was judged on whether it was flawlessly smooth. The relationship to borscht is distant, and the divergence is one of class and kitchen. Where a Ukrainian or Polish cook kept the shreds of beet and cabbage visible and sharpened the pot with sour beet brine or kvass, the hotel chef purées, sieves, and enriches.