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Patato with Vermicelli
Cut in small pieces four ounces lean salt pork, two leeks and one medium, white onion, place in a saucepan with an ounce butter and two bay leaves. Set the pan on the fire and cook for ten minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Finely slice six peeled raw potatoes, add to the pan with a quart white broth and three pints water, season with a light teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon pepper, and mix lightly. Cover the pan and let slowly boil for one hour, press the puree through a sieve into a basin, then through a Chinese strainer into another saucepan. Drop two ounces vermicelli in a pint boiling broth and boil for ten minutes, then add vermicelli and broth to the puree. Mix well, boil for ten minutes, pour the soup into a soup tureen and serve.
A potato-leek puree thinned with broth and finished with pasta — essentially a potage Parmentier with a vermicelli garnish. The technique is straightforward; the proportions and the double straining are what need attention.
- White brothA pale stock made from veal bones or chicken, without browning. A light chicken stock is the closest modern equivalent; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which will muddy the color the recipe is aiming for.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. The first pass through a coarse sieve breaks the potato down; the chinois catches leek fiber and pork. If you only have one fine strainer, push through it twice.
- Liquid is generousA quart of broth plus three pints of water plus another pint with the vermicelli comes to roughly three quarts of liquid for six potatoes. That yields a thin soup by current taste. Cutting the water to a pint or two gives a thicker body.
- Salt porkFour ounces of lean salt pork, diced and rendered with the butter, is the seasoning backbone. Modern salt pork varies in saltiness — taste before adding the teaspoon of salt, and hold some back until the end.
- Fish out the bay leavesThey should come out before the soup goes through the sieve, or you will be forcing leaf fragments through the mesh.
- Vermicelli timingTen minutes in broth, then ten more in the puree, is twenty minutes of cooking for thin pasta. It will be mush. Boil it four or five minutes in the pint of broth, add both to the finished puree, and bring back to a simmer only long enough to heat through.
- YieldAbout three quarts as written, or eight to ten servings. Serve immediately; the vermicelli keeps swelling and the soup thickens noticeably on standing.
Puree of potato with leek and onion is the base of a whole family of French soups, the best known being potage Parmentier, named for Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the agronomist generally credited with persuading the French to eat potatoes in the late eighteenth century. Adding a starch garnish — vermicelli, tapioca, rice, croutons — was how professional kitchens spun one mother puree into a dozen menu names, which is exactly why a book like this lists so many near-identical potato soups under different headings. The instruction to strain twice, through sieve and then chinois, aims at a soup that is perfectly smooth. The heading's "Patato" is a misspelling, faithfully reproduced here as printed.