Home › The World's Kitchen › Potage, Artois
Potage, Artois
Prepare a cream St. Germain strain through a sieve into a basin, then through a Chinese strainer into a saucepan, adding one pint white broth, with two ounces of raw rice; mix lightly and let simmer for forty minutes, remove, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
This is a classical French kitchen shorthand rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have a cream St. Germain (a pea purée soup) on hand and simply builds on it. Two points decide whether it works — how thin the base is before the rice goes in, and how gently it simmers.
- The base it depends onCream St. Germain is a purée of green peas, usually with a little onion or leek and lettuce, moistened with white stock and finished with cream. The recipe does not say how much of it to use; the quantity is left to the cook.
- Chinese strainerA chinois: the tall conical fine-mesh strainer. The double straining — coarse sieve first, then chinois — is there to remove pea skins, and it matters, since nothing later in the recipe will break them down.
- White brothA pale, unroasted stock — veal or chicken bones started in cold water and skimmed, not browned. A light chicken stock is the practical modern substitute; a dark or heavily reduced stock will muddy both colour and flavour.
- Two ounces of raw riceAbout a third of a cup of long or medium grain white rice. It thickens the soup as it cooks and gives body without flour; it is not a garnish and should not be rinsed of its surface starch.
- Forty minutes, and why it is that longRice simmered in a thick purée cooks more slowly than rice in plain water. Keep the heat low and stir often — this soup scorches on the bottom before it shows any sign on top.
- ConsistencyThe rice will keep absorbing liquid as the pot sits. Thin with more white broth just before serving, and taste again for salt at that point, since the rice will have flattened the seasoning.
- ColourGreen pea purée dulls to olive with prolonged heat. Cooks who want it bright add a portion of the pea purée at the very end, after the rice is done, rather than simmering all of it the full forty minutes.
Named soups of this kind are the vocabulary of the professional French kitchen around 1900, where a cook was expected to know that Saint-Germain meant peas and to build outward from there by adding one defining element. Purée Artois is often said to be exactly this: a pea purée bound with rice rather than with flour or bread, and the name is conventionally linked to the northern French province of Artois, though the connection to any actual local dish is traditional rather than documented. The interest of the entry is less the soup than the method of the books it comes from — recipes that cross-reference one another, so that a single line of text stands for a full afternoon of stockpot and chinois work performed elsewhere in the kitchen.