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Potage, Alsacienne
Cut half a very small cabbage in quarters, remove the core and stale leaves, then cut cabbage into exceedingly thin julienne strips, place in a saucepan with one ounce butter, one teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, lightly mix. Cover the pan and let steam until all the moisture evaporates. Cut one-fourth of a pound of lean salt pork into quarter-inch pieces, place in a frying pan with a teaspoon of melted butter, fry until a nice golden colour, drain and add to cabbage. Peel, wash and cut two medium, raw potatoes into half-inch squares and add to the pan. Moisten with two and a half quarts of white broth and let slowly boil for one hour. Skim fat from the surface, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A plain Alsatian cabbage-and-pork soup that depends almost entirely on two things: cutting the cabbage fine and driving the water out of it before any liquid goes in. Everything else is timing.
- The hinge: dry-steam the cabbage firstSweating the shredded cabbage in butter under a lid until the pan is dry concentrates its sweetness and removes the sulphurous edge boiled cabbage develops. Rush this and the finished soup tastes flatly of water and cabbage.
- White brothA light, unbrowned stock -- veal or chicken, no roasted bones, no tomato. Unsalted or low-sodium is essential here because the salt pork will do most of the seasoning.
- Salt porkCures vary a good deal. Taste a fried piece; if it is aggressive, blanch the diced pork in water for five minutes and drain before frying. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon or pancetta substitutes well.
- Cut the salt in halfOne teaspoon of salt on half a small cabbage, plus a quarter-pound of cured pork, plus stock, is more than most palates now want. Add a pinch at the start and season at the end once the pork has given up its salt.
- Half a teaspoon of pepperThat is a genuinely peppery soup and it is deliberate -- the heat is part of the dish. Reduce it if you like, but do not leave it out.
- One hour of slow boilingRead "slowly boil" as a bare simmer. The potatoes are meant to soften to the point of thickening the broth slightly; a hard boil will break them into mush and cloud the soup.
- Quantity and yieldTwo and a half quarts of broth gives roughly eight servings. The recipe halves readily, though in a smaller pan you may need to watch the hour-long simmer so the broth does not over-reduce.
- SkimmingThe fat from the pork and butter will pool at the surface. Skim it, or chill the soup and lift the set fat off -- the soup reheats better than it sits hot.
Alsace has spent centuries passing between French and German hands, and its cooking shows it: potage is the French word on the menu, but the contents -- cabbage, salt pork, potato -- are the standard winter larder of the upper Rhine, much the same combination that underlies choucroute garnie and many German cabbage soups. The dish is peasant food dressed in restaurant French. In the classical French repertoire a regional tag such as a l'Alsacienne generally pointed to cabbage or sauerkraut with pork, though the label was not applied with complete consistency. The instruction to use "white broth" rather than brown reflects the same tradition: stocks were commonly kept in both colours, and choosing between them was part of what a cook was expected to know.