Home › The World's Kitchen › Potage, Basque
Potage, Basque
Soak half a pint dried white beans in cold water for seven hours. Remove the outer leaves of a very small, sound green cabbage, cut it in half, remove the stalk and finely slice it. Place in a large saucepan with a finely sliced onion, two sliced leaks, two beans crushed garlic and half an ounce butter, place on the fire and cook for fifteen minutes, lightly stirring once in a while. Add the drained beans and four sliced, medium, sound, peeled raw potatoes, moisten with three and a half quarts water, season with two teaspoons salt and half a teaspoon white pepper, adding two ounces lean, raw bacon and one cervela sausage. Cover the pan and let gently simmer for two hours, remove the bacon and cervela, pour the soup into a hot tureen, cut the cervela into thin slices, place them on a dish and serve both separately.
A Basque farmhouse soup of beans, cabbage and sausage, written for a hotel kitchen and scaled accordingly. A few of the terms are French words that survived translation only halfway.
- "Two beans crushed garlic"Read it as two cloves of garlic, crushed. The odd wording probably comes from French gousse, which serves for both a garlic clove and a seed pod.
- LeaksLeeks. Two medium ones, white and pale green parts, sliced and washed well after slicing; grit hides between the layers.
- CervelaCervelas, the French garlic sausage — a smooth, cooked, often lightly smoked pork sausage. A Polish kielbasa or a saucisson à l'ail is the closest common substitute; a coarse fresh Italian sausage is not, as it will fall apart over two hours.
- Lean raw baconNot breakfast bacon. "Raw" here means an uncooked slab piece, and the intention is probably an unsmoked cured cut such as salt pork or petit salé, poached in the broth and lifted out whole. Pancetta or a piece of unsmoked slab bacon works; if you use heavily smoked bacon the whole pot will taste of it.
- Half a pint of beansDry measure: about one cup, roughly 7 oz of dried white beans. Seven hours' soaking is a working day, not a rule — overnight is the same thing.
- The liquidThree and a half quarts is a great deal of water for a cup of beans and four potatoes; it produces a thin, brothy soup in the peasant manner rather than a thick one. If you want body, drop to two and a half quarts, or crush a few of the cooked potatoes against the side of the pan before serving.
- Two hours of simmeringNeeded for the beans, which have had only a short soak and are cooked in salted water. Salt is often said to slow their softening, though this is disputed; if your beans are old they may want longer, so check them before you commit to the timing.
- ServingThe sausage is deliberately not sliced into the soup — broth in the tureen, sliced cervelas on its own dish. The recipe says only to remove the bacon and gives no further direction for it. Yields eight to ten servings as written.
Potage basque belongs to the family of thick Pyrenean vegetable-and-pork soups of which garbure is the best-known member: dried beans, cabbage, whatever root vegetables the garden gave, and a piece of cured pork that flavours the pot and is then eaten as a separate course. The division of broth from meat is often said to be the older way of serving such a dish, and it survives here. Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, assembled The International Cook Book in 1906 as a survey of national dishes for American cooks, and the fingerprints of a French-trained kitchen are all over the transcription \for leeks, beans of garlic for cloves, cervela for cervelas — words carried over by ear rather than looked up.