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Cream of Lettuce
Detach the leaves from two heads large green lettuce, thoroughly wash and drain, keeping the hearts for salad. Heat an ounce butter in a saucepan, add the lettuce and cook for ten minutes, stirring lightly meanwhile; moisten with two and a half quarts broth, add one peeled onion with two cloves stuck in it, two branches parsley, one branch chervil, two branches celery, one heavy teaspoon salt, one level tablespoon sugar, two saltspoons cayenne and one saltspoon grated nutmeg. Cover the pan and let gently boil for fifty-five minutes. Place three ounces rice flour in a bowl, pour in one gill each cream and milk, mix with a whisk for two minutes, then add to the soup. Continually mix until it comes to a boil, remove from fire, press cream through a sieve into a basin, then strain through a cheesecloth into a soup tureen and serve.
A classic French crème de laitue given in Escoffier-era proportions: a large yield, a long simmer, and a rice-flour liaison rather than a roux. A few of its measures and its phrasing need translating.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so the liaison is 1/2 cup cream plus 1/2 cup milk. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: the cayenne comes to 1/2 teaspoon and the nutmeg to 1/4 teaspoon.
- Rice flourThree ounces is roughly a scant 1/2 to 2/3 cup of finely milled rice flour, depending on how it packs; not sweet (glutinous) rice flour. Whisk it into the cold cream and milk until perfectly smooth before it goes near the pot, or it will set in lumps on contact with the hot broth.
- "Press cream through a sieve"This is the hinge of the method and the phrase is misleading. "Cream" here means the soup itself: force the cooked lettuce and aromatics through a fine sieve to purée them, then pass the result through cheesecloth for a smooth finish. Discard the clove-stuck onion and the herb stems first.
- The brothTwo and a half quarts of broth; a light white stock, veal or chicken, suits the style, unsalted or lightly salted. The recipe already adds a heavy teaspoon of salt on its own account, so a salty commercial stock will overshoot.
- Fifty-five minutesThat is a long boil by modern standards and it will take the soup to an olive-drab colour. This is what the original intends; if green matters to you, 20 to 25 minutes is enough to cook the lettuce through. Note that the recipe takes the soup off the fire as soon as it returns to the boil after the rice-flour liaison goes in.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh. A little tarragon plus extra parsley gives a near-enough anise note; leaving it out entirely does no harm.
- The sugarA level tablespoon in two and a half quarts is seasoning, not sweetening. It offsets the mild bitterness that long-cooked lettuce develops, particularly with romaine.
- YieldAbout eleven cups of liquid go in, but the long boil and the double straining take some back, so expect somewhat less in the tureen: eight or so servings as a first course. Halve it comfortably.
Lettuce soup belongs to the French repertoire of potages crèmes, purée soups bound with a starch and finished with dairy, which were codified in the professional kitchens of the late nineteenth century and travelled into English-language books like this one largely intact. The instruction to keep the hearts for salad is a professional economy: the tender centres were worth more raw, and the coarse outer leaves that a household might otherwise discard cook down into something delicate. Rice flour appears here as an alternative to a butter-and-flour roux, one of several thickeners used for cream soups meant to be strained and served pale and smooth. The onion studded with cloves is the oignon piqué, still a fixture of French stock and sauce work.