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Pot Au Feu, Vieillemode
Soak half pint dried, large white beans in cold water for eight hours, drain and place them in a large earthen soup pot. Cut half a very small cabbage in four parts lengthwise, discard all stale leaves, cut off stalk, then finely slice and add to beans in pot. Boil two ounces dried split peas in a pint water for five minutes, drain well, add to soup and moisten with three quarts water. Season with a heavy teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, add one ounce good butter, then let slowly boil for forty-five minutes. Add a small Italian cervela sausage, if at hand, two small, finely sliced raw potatoes, a teaspoon each chopped parsley and chives. Cover pot, slowly simmer for an hour and a half, remove the cervelas, pour soup into a tureen and serve.
A meatless peasant soup despite the grand name, and the only real difficulty is that dried beans do not keep to a schedule. Read the timings as minimums.
- Half pint of beansDry measure by volume: about 1 cup, roughly 7 oz of large white beans — cannellini, Great Northern or the marrowfat type. It swells to something over 2 cups cooked.
- The beans set the clockThe total simmering here comes to about 2 hours 15 minutes, which is enough for recently dried beans and not enough for old ones. Test a bean before you add the potatoes; if it still has a chalky centre, keep simmering and hold the potatoes back until it does not.
- Salt at the startThe recipe salts early and that is fine — the old warning that salt toughens bean skins does not hold up. A heavy teaspoon in three quarts is modest; taste again at the end.
- Earthen soup potAny heavy pot with a lid works. Earthenware was presumably chosen for slow, even heat, which a Dutch oven on a low burner reproduces.
- Blanching the split peasThe recipe does not say why the peas are boiled five minutes and drained; the likely effect is to rinse away loose starch and dust so the broth stays clearer. Worth keeping; it takes no time.
- CervelasA cooked pork sausage, often garlic-seasoned; the Italian cervellata the recipe seems to mean is a related Milanese type. Substitute a small kielbasa or a mild cooking sausage. It goes in whole to flavour the pot and, as the recipe directs, is lifted out before serving; slice it and serve alongside rather than discarding it.
- ButterOne ounce is 2 tablespoons. It is the only fat in the soup if you leave out the sausage, so do not cut it.
- YieldThree quarts of water plus vegetables gives six to eight generous bowls. It thickens overnight and will want thinning with water when reheated.
Vieille mode means simply "old fashioned," and the label is doing some work here: a true pot-au-feu is a pot of beef and marrow bones simmered with root vegetables, the Sunday dinner of the French household, while this version has no meat in it beyond an optional sausage borrowed from the Italian side of the Alps. Soups of dried beans, split peas, cabbage and potato thickened by nothing but their own starch were the everyday reality behind the famous name, which is often said to derive from the pot that hung over the fire and was topped up rather than emptied. That such a dish should be printed under the grander title says something about how cookbooks worked: a French name carried a weight that beans and cabbage did not. The chives and parsley finish, and the insistence on discarding stale outer cabbage leaves, show a careful hand at work.