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Lettuce with Peas
Detach leaves from two large heads lettuce, thoroughly wash them in different changes fresh water, then drain on a cloth. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a saucepan, add lettuce with a teaspoon salt and one teaspoon sugar and cook ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile; pour in two tablespoons flour, stir well while heating two minutes, moisten with two and a half quarts broth, add one pint freshly shelled peas and half teaspoon pepper. Tie in a bunch two branches parsley, one branch chervil, two leeks, one sprig thyme and one bay leaf; add this bouquet to soup, cover pan and gently boil forty five minutes. Lift up bouquet, pour soup into an earthen soup tureen, arrange six slices toasted French bread over soup, sprinkle two tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese on top, set in oven ten minutes. Remove and serve.
Despite the name, this is a soup: two and a half quarts of broth make roughly six generous bowls, gratinéed under toast and Parmesan. A few of the timings belong to an era when green vegetables were expected to be soft.
- YieldTwo and a half quarts of broth plus vegetables serves six, which matches the six slices of toast. It halves cleanly.
- The peasForty-five minutes at a boil will turn fresh shelled peas olive-grey and mealy. Simmer the lettuce and broth with the bouquet for the full time, then add the peas for the last eight to ten minutes; frozen peas need three or four.
- LettuceTwo large heads suggests a loose romaine or butterhead rather than a tight crisphead. The recipe asks only that the leaves be detached and washed; cooked in butter and then boiled in broth they collapse to almost nothing, thickening and sweetening the soup rather than staying in leaves.
- The bouquetParsley, chervil, leeks, thyme and bay tied with string, or bundled in cheesecloth. Chervil is worth seeking out for its faint anise note; if unavailable, use a little extra parsley and accept that the flavour shifts.
- SaltA teaspoon of salt goes in before the broth. If your broth is commercial and already salted, hold the added salt until the end and taste.
- The oven stepNo temperature is given. A hot oven, 400-425F, for ten minutes is enough to melt the Parmesan and colour the toast; a broiler for two or three minutes does the same job.
- The tureenAn earthen soup tureen here means a glazed earthenware vessel that will take oven heat. Use any ovenproof casserole or individual onion-soup crocks; most modern decorative tureens are not made to go in an oven.
- Melted butter"One and a half tablespoons melted butter" simply means butter melted in the pan before the lettuce goes in — no separate step needed.
Lettuce cooked with peas is a fixture of French home cookery, closest kin to petits pois à la française, in which shredded lettuce, a little sugar and butter braise together with young peas until the lettuce all but dissolves. Turning that pairing into a soup finished with toast and grated cheese recalls the gratinéed onion soup, where bread and cheese are set over the tureen and browned in the oven. The book it comes from, Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), was compiled by a longtime Delmonico's man and is heavily weighted toward the French repertoire that governed American restaurant cooking of the period; sugar with peas, a bouquet garni of parsley, chervil, leek, thyme and bay, and the assumption that a household can lay hands on two and a half quarts of broth all point to professional French practice written down for domestic readers.