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Cream of String Beans
Thoroughly wash and drain a quart fresh string beans, plunge them in boiling water for ten minutes, drain, place in a saucepan with two ounces butter, set on the fire and cook for ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Moisten with two quarts broth add a white onion with two cloves stuck in. Tie in a bunch two branches parsley, one branch chervil, a sprig thyme, one bay leaf, and add to the soup. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon sugar and two saltspoons cayenne pepper, lightly mix, then let gently boil for one hour. Dilute three ounces rice flour with a pint milk and add to the soup, constantly stirring while boiling for five minutes; add half ounce good butter, mix till well melted, strain through sieve into a basin, then through cheesecloth into a soup tureen and serve.
A classic strained cream soup in the French manner, built on rice flour rather than a roux. Nothing here is difficult, but two things need translating: the saltspoon, and the expectation that the beans will end up looking green.
- A quart of string beansBeans were measured by volume here; a quart of trimmed, cut green beans is roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb. Top, tail and cut them into short lengths before measuring.
- Saltspoons of cayenneA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two is half a teaspoon of cayenne for two quarts of soup. That is assertive by modern standards for a delicate cream soup; start with a quarter teaspoon and adjust at the end, after straining.
- Rice flour, not cornstarchRice flour gives this soup its particular silky, slightly matte body and is widely sold in supermarkets and Asian groceries. Three ounces is roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup, depending on the grind. Whisk it into the cold pint of milk until perfectly smooth before it goes near the pot, or it will seize into lumps that no sieve will forgive.
- The double strainSieve first to catch the bean fibre, onion and herb bundle, then pass through cheesecloth for the fine polish. This is the step that makes it a cream soup rather than a bean soup, and skipping it changes the dish entirely.
- Don't expect greenAn hour at a boil will take the beans to olive-drab. Since the soup is strained and then finished pale with milk and butter, the colour of the beans themselves hardly matters here. If you want a bright green soup, this is not that recipe.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh. Flat-leaf parsley with a few tarragon leaves approximates its faint anise note; leaving it out simply makes the bouquet plainer.
- BrothProbably a light chicken or veal stock. A heavily reduced or dark stock will overwhelm the beans and muddy the pale colour the double straining is meant to protect.
- YieldAbout two quarts finished, or six to eight servings as a first course. Serve promptly — rice-flour-thickened soups thicken further as they cool and will need thinning with hot milk if held.
This belongs to the family of potages crèmes codified in professional French kitchens in the nineteenth century, where nearly any vegetable could be simmered in broth, bound with a farinaceous thickener, enriched with butter and milk, and forced through cloth into a uniform velvet. The pattern is always the same — the vegetable names the soup, the method never varies — which is why period cookbooks print dozens of them in near-identical wording. The rice flour is the older choice: before cornstarch became a pantry staple, rice flour is often said to have been the usual binder for soups meant to stay white, since it thickens without the raw taste of uncooked wheat flour and does not cloud. The onion clouté, the herb bunch and the pinch of sugar to lift the vegetable are all straight from the professional repertoire, which is what a book titled The International Cook Book was selling to American home cooks: restaurant technique, scaled down to a household saucepan.