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Cucumber-Chiffonade
Peel two medium, sound, ripe cucumbers, remove the spongy parts with a corer, then cut them in thin slices, plunge in boiling water and boil for five minutes, remove and drain. Remove the stalks from a pint of fresh sorrel leaves and thoroughly wash and drain. Cut them into julienne strips, cut in same way six well-cleaned green lettuce leaves, then place the sorrel and lettuce in a saucepan with an ounce butter and cook on the fire for five minutes, stirring with a wooden spoon once in a while. Add the cucumbers with the leaves from two branches chervil and half teaspoon finely chopped parsley, moisten with a consomme, add a teaspoon sugar, then boil for twenty-five minutes, pour the soup into a soup tureen and serve with six slices of toasted French bread.
A French potage in the guise of a summer soup: cooked cucumber with a chiffonade of sorrel and lettuce. The original assumes you know how much stock a soup wants, and never says.
- The missing quantityNo volume of consomme is given. For two cucumbers and a pint of leaves, 1 1/2 to 2 quarts gives a soup rather than a stew; start at the lower end and judge by the pan.
- ChiffonadeThe name is the technique, not an ingredient. Stack the sorrel and lettuce leaves, roll them tightly and slice across into fine ribbons; "julienne strips" here means the same thing.
- SorrelRarely stocked in supermarkets; look for it at farm markets in spring and early summer, or grow it. Its sharpness is the point of the dish, so spinach is a substitute only in texture. If you use spinach, add lemon juice at the end.
- Cook the leaves in a non-reactive panSorrel's oxalic acid will pick up metallic flavours and grey colour from bare aluminium, cast iron or unlined copper. Use stainless or enamel.
- Coring the cucumbersAn apple corer run down the length removes the seed core. With modern thin-skinned varieties there may be little worth removing; the older, larger cucumbers this book assumes were coarser in the middle.
- The two boilingsBlanching the cucumber slices five minutes and then simmering twenty-five will leave them very soft, which is the intended effect in a potage of this type. If you want the cucumber to hold its shape, skip the blanch and add the slices in the last ten minutes.
- Simmer, do not boil hard"Boil for twenty-five minutes" means a steady simmer. A rolling boil drives off the chervil, which is the most fugitive flavour in the pot.
- The sugarA teaspoon is there to balance the sorrel's acidity, not to sweeten. Taste before adding all of it, since sorrel varies a great deal in sharpness.
- YieldSix slices of toast, so six servings as a first course.
Chiffonade — literally "made of rags" — is the classical French term for herbs and salad leaves cut into fine ribbons, and by the nineteenth century it named a whole family of light potages built on sorrel and lettuce softened in butter. Sorrel soup in one form or another runs through French, Polish, Russian and Jewish cooking, where its acidity did the work a squeeze of lemon does now. Cucumber was the less usual addition: cooked cucumber, once common in European kitchens as a vegetable in its own right, has largely retreated to the salad bowl in English-speaking countries. This one comes from Filippini's International Cook Book (1906), and belongs squarely to the repertoire of the restaurant kitchen he came from — Delmonico's in New York.