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Potage Au Pain
Toast twelve thin slices French bread to a nice golden colour and place them in a soup tureen, adding half teaspoon very finely chopped parsley and the leaves of two branches chervil. Prepare and strain a consomme into the tureen and serve.
A bread soup of the simplest French kind: toast in the bottom of the tureen, hot clear broth poured over at the table. Almost everything depends on the consommé, which the recipe assumes you already have.
- The hinge: pour at the last momentThe toast should meet the broth in the tureen and go straight to the table. Left to stand, the slices collapse into paste and the point of the dish — crisp edges softening as you eat — is lost.
- Quantity of consomméNone is given. For twelve slices allow roughly 2 quarts (2 litres), which serves six as a first course. The broth should just cover the bread, not swamp it.
- What consommé means hereA clarified stock, usually beef, raft-clarified with egg white and lean minced beef and strained through a cloth until it is transparent. A cloudy or gelatinous homemade stock will look wrong in a shallow soup plate; a good commercial beef consommé is a reasonable stand-in.
- French breadA baguette or similar lean, crusty loaf, cut in slices about 1/4 inch thick. Enriched sandwich bread turns to mush and is too sweet against a savoury broth.
- ToastingGolden means golden, not brown. Dark toast can give the broth a bitter edge once the hot liquid draws the flavour out. If a toaster colours unevenly, a moderate oven for eight to ten minutes, turning once, gives more even colour.
- ChervilTwo branches means two small sprigs, leaves picked and left whole. Chervil is delicate and short-lived; if you cannot find it, a scant pinch of tarragon plus extra parsley approximates its faint anise note, though it is not the same thing.
- Warm the tureenTwo quarts of broth lose a surprising amount of heat to cold china. Rinse the tureen with boiling water and dry it before the toast goes in.
- SeasoningThe recipe adds no salt because the consommé is expected to carry it. Taste and correct the broth before it leaves the pan, since nothing can be adjusted once it is over the bread.
Bread and broth is the oldest form of soup there is — the word soup is closely bound up with the sop, the slice of bread the liquid was poured over, the two words sharing a common root in the Old French soupe, which meant both the soaked bread and the broth — and medieval French kitchens served potages that were essentially this dish with coarser bread and rougher stock. By the time Filippini was compiling The International Cook Book for an American audience in the early 1900s, the peasant panade had been refined into a restaurant course: the bread reduced to a few thin toasted rounds, the liquid a laboriously clarified consommé, and chervil. That trajectory — a frugal dish surviving into fine dining by getting thinner and clearer rather than richer — is common in French cookery, and the chervil is a good marker of the period, being a standard fines herbes component then and an uncommon sight in shops now.