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Potage, Bolivienne
Cut a half pound raw, lean veal into quarter-inch dice pieces, place in a saucepan with two ounces raw, lean ham cut in quarter-inch squares, adding two medium, finely chopped white onions, with two tablespoons melted butter, and lightly brown for ten minutes. Moisten with a quart of broth and four pints of water, season with half teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Tie together two leeks, two branches celery, one branch parsley and a branch chervil and add to the soup, then let slowly boil for forty-five minutes. Peel, remove seeds and cut into small pieces two medium, fresh red tomatoes, add to the soup and let slowly boil twenty-five minutes. Lift up the bouquet, strew two ounces tapioca into the soup, lightly mixing meanwhile, boil for twenty minutes more, occasionally mixing meanwhile. Pour the soup into a soup tureen and serve.
A clear tapioca-thickened meat soup in the grand-hotel style, straightforward once you sort out the liquid volumes and the tapioca.
- The hinge: what kind of tapiocaUse small pearl tapioca, not instant or minute tapioca and not flour. Instant tapioca dissolves into gluey strings in twenty minutes of boiling; the pearls should stay distinct and translucent, suspended in a clear broth.
- Liquid quantitiesA quart of broth plus four pints of water is six pints, about 3 quarts or 2.8 litres, in one pot. Expect roughly a third to cook away over the ninety minutes of simmering. A wide pan will reduce faster than the recipe intends; use a tall stockpot.
- Strew, don't dumpScatter the tapioca in a thin stream while stirring. Added all at once it clumps on contact and the lumps never break up.
- "Slowly boil"This means a bare simmer with the surface just trembling. A true rolling boil will cloud the soup and shred the veal dice, which are meant to stay visible in the bowl.
- The bouquetTwo leeks here means whole trimmed leeks tied in with the celery and herbs, then lifted out and discarded, not sliced leeks left in the soup. Chervil is worth seeking out at a farmers' market; if you cannot find it, add a little extra parsley and finish with fresh tarragon off the heat rather than boiling tarragon in.
- Veal and hamShoulder or breast of veal cuts into neat dice and stays tender. For the ham, use a dry-cured piece such as prosciutto or country ham end rather than wet-cured deli ham, which turns the soup salty and pale.
- Salt at the endHalf a teaspoon of salt is for six pints of already-seasoned broth plus salted ham. Taste after the tapioca has gone in and the volume has settled, then correct.
- YieldAbout eight to ten first-course servings. It thickens noticeably as it cools; thin with hot broth when reheating.
This is one of hundreds of soups in Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), and it belongs to a specific professional habit of the period: naming a garnished consommé or purée after a country, a city or a patron, then filing it in the repertoire as a fixed formula. Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, wrote for cooks who needed a different soup for every day of the year, and place-names were the filing system. What actually makes this soup "Bolivienne" is not documented in the book, and there is nothing recognisably Andean about it. Tapioca is made from cassava starch, a South American plant whose starch reached European kitchens through trade. Pearl tapioca soups thickened a clear broth without flour, leaving it bright rather than muddy, and similar soups appear on the era's hotel menus under a range of national labels.