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Cream of Lettuce, Demidoff
Prepare a chicken broth, using four quarts water in place of three quarts, strain into a vessel and keep until required. Remove leaves from two head lettuce, as green as possible, thoroughly wash in plenty cold water, drain, place in a saucepan with an ounce butter, a tablespoon sugar, cook on fire for ten minutes, stirring once in a while, then pour in chicken broth. Add a white onion with two cloves stuck in it, two branches parsley, a branch chervil, two bay leaves and season with a heavy teaspoon salt. Lightly mix and let gently boil for an hour and a half, then pour in a gill demi-glace, two tablespoons sherry, a saltspoon cayenne, mix well and boil for ten minutes. Place two ounces rice flour in a bowl, dilute it with half gill cream, half ounce good butter, pour into soup and sharply whisk while cooking for five minutes. Strain soup through sieve into a basin, then through cheesecloth into tureen, and serve with a plate of bread croutons separately.
A French-style velvet soup of the Escoffier era, built on stock and thickened with rice flour rather than a roux. Almost everything here is straightforward for a modern cook once the old measures are translated.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is 4 fl oz, or half a cup, so a half gill is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon — the cayenne is a whisper, not a heat note.
- The brothThe instruction to use four quarts of water in place of three refers back to the book's own chicken broth recipe, giving a larger and correspondingly lighter yield; the recipe does not say why. Four quarts of light chicken stock is the practical substitution.
- Demi-glaceClassically espagnole sauce reduced with brown stock; the modern stand-in is a strong brown veal or beef stock reduced until it coats a spoon. Good jarred or frozen demi-glace works; a cup of strong homemade brown stock reduced to a quarter cup is closer than a bouillon cube, which will only make the soup salty.
- Rice flourTwo ounces is roughly a scant half cup. Slake it thoroughly in the cream and softened butter before it goes in and whisk hard, or it will set into lumps that the sieve will simply hold back.
- The hour and a halfNinety minutes of boiling destroys any green the lettuce has left. Since the soup is strained twice and finished pale, this matters less than it would elsewhere, but 30 to 40 minutes extracts all the flavor there is; longer only flattens it.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh. A small handful of flat parsley with a few fennel or tarragon fronds gives the same faintly aniseed lift; dried chervil contributes nothing.
- The double strainThe sieve removes the aromatics and lettuce, the cheesecloth catches any grain of rice flour. Skipping the second pass leaves a soup that tastes right but feels chalky.
- YieldThe broth will lose some volume over the long simmer, so expect somewhere in the region of 3 quarts of finished soup, eight to ten servings. Croutons go alongside, not floated in.
The Demidoffs were a Russian industrial dynasty ennobled in the eighteenth century, and Anatole Demidoff, who married a niece of Napoleon and kept a famously grand table in Paris and Florence, is the figure usually credited with the string of French dishes bearing the name — poularde Demidoff being the best known. As with Rossini or Melba, the label attaches to a style rather than a fixed formula: in classical practice a Demidoff dish is marked by a garnish of vegetables cut in crescents with truffle and Madeira. That a head of lettuce could be treated as a soup vegetable at all reflects an older kitchen habit, common in France and England, of braising lettuce in butter as one would sorrel or spinach; the modern assumption that lettuce is strictly salad material came later. The recipe's presence in Alexander Filippini's International Cook Book — Filippini having spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York — shows how thoroughly the vocabulary of Parisian haute cuisine had been absorbed into American restaurant cooking by the turn of the twentieth century.