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Potage, Bagration
Place in a saucepan a sliced carrot, a sliced onion, a branch parsley, a sprig thyme, a bay leaf, a clove, two quarts water, one and a half teaspoons salt, half teaspoon pepper and two pounds fish bones or fish heads, then let boil for forty-five minutes. Mix in a saucepan one ounce butter with two ounces flour, stir well while heating for a minute, and strain the fish broth through a cheesecloth into the pan, add a pint hot milk, mix well and let boil for twenty minutes. Then add a gill cream, one-half ounce butter and one teaspoon anchovy essence. Mix well and let boil for five minutes. Cut half a pound of fresh halibut in quarter-inch pieces, place in a saucepan with one-half gill white wine and one gill broth and boil for ten minutes, then add it to the soup, mix well, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A classic velouté-style fish soup that hangs on one thing: the halibut goes in at the very end and barely cooks. Everything else is stock and thickening.
- The hinge — the fishQuarter-inch dice of halibut is cooked through in two to three minutes in simmering liquid. The ten minutes called for will leave it dry and chalky, and it will shred into the soup. Poach the dice gently in the wine and broth until just opaque, then fold them in off the heat.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces. So a gill of cream is 1/2 cup, half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup.
- Fish bonesTwo pounds of frames and heads from lean white fish — halibut, sole, cod, snapper. Gills should be pulled out, as they carry blood and grit and turn the stock bitter. Salmon, mackerel and other oily fish make an unpleasant stock here.
- Forty-five minutes is too longFish bones give up everything they have in 20 to 30 minutes; past that the stock turns glue-like and faintly bitter. Skim the foam in the first few minutes and keep it at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil, or the broth will cloud.
- Anchovy essenceA thin, salty anchovy extract sold bottled in the period. Anchovy paste is the nearest thing on a modern shelf — use about a teaspoon, slackened with a spoonful of the hot broth before it goes in, or it will sit in lumps.
- SaltThe seasoning is set at the stock stage, before the broth boils another 25 minutes with milk, cream and anchovy. Salt the stock lightly and correct at the end.
- Roux and brothOne ounce butter to two ounces flour is a stiff, dry roux. Strain the broth in gradually and whisk hard at first, or the soup will be lumpy; a warm rather than boiling broth is easier to control.
- YieldSomething like two quarts once the long boiling has taken its toll — six to eight as a first course. It does not reheat well once the halibut is in.
Potage Bagration is named for Prince Pyotr Bagration, the Russian general mortally wounded at Borodino in 1812, and it belongs to the wave of dishes French chefs christened after military and diplomatic figures of the Napoleonic era; the naming is generally credited to the Carême generation, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. In the classical repertoire the name covers two quite different soups — a veal velouté finished with macaroni, and this fish version, a fish velouté sharpened with anchovy and garnished with diced white fish. Its appearance in Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book reflects the author's long career at Delmonico's in New York, where the French grande cuisine vocabulary was the working language of the kitchen and a soup like this would have been expected to appear by name on a printed menu.