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Potage, Bonne-Dame
With a very small Parisian potato scoop dig out all you can from two medium carrots, two white turnips, one parsnip, and keep these articles on a plate till required. Cut in very small square pieces, a quarter pound raw, lean veal, two ounces raw lean ham, one medium Bermuda onion and the white part of two leeks. Place all these articles, including first vegetables, in a saucepan with one ounce butter and cook on a brisk fire for fifteen minutes, stirring once in a while. Moisten with two and half quarts broth and two gills pure tomato juice. Season with a heavy teaspoon salt, let gently boil for twenty-five minutes, add two ounces well-washed and thoroughly drained raw rice, and let boil continually for thirty minutes longer. Finely chop together two branches parsley, one branch chervil and a half bean sound garlic, add it to soup, lightly mix and let boil for ten minutes longer. Pour soup into a tureen and serve with an ounce of grated Parmesan cheese separately.
A clear vegetable-and-rice soup built on a veal and ham base. Nothing here is difficult, but the timings and a few of the terms need translating.
- The rice is the hingeThirty minutes of hard boiling, plus ten more after the herbs go in, will leave long-grain rice collapsed and the broth cloudy. Twenty minutes at a bare simmer is enough, and the soup thickens noticeably as it stands.
- Two gillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of tomato juice is one cup. Use a plain unsalted juice or thin passata; modern seasoned vegetable-juice blends will overwhelm the veal.
- Parisian potato scoopA melon baller, in the smallest size you own (about 1/4 inch). The point is uniform beads of carrot, turnip and parsnip that cook evenly and look deliberate. Save the trimmings for stock rather than throwing them out.
- A half bean of garlic"Bean" here means a clove, and half of one is the intended dose. This is a delicate soup, not a garlicky one.
- Bermuda onionA mild sweet onion. The nearest things on sale now are sweet onions such as Vidalia or Walla Walla. A yellow onion works but will be sharper.
- Brisk fireMedium-high heat. Fifteen minutes of it with an ounce of butter is meant to sweat and lightly colour the meat and vegetables without browning them hard.
- ChervilOften unavailable fresh and worthless dried. A little tarragon plus extra parsley gives the closest anise-and-grass note; leave it out rather than substitute dried.
- Salt and brothA "heavy teaspoon" of salt assumes an unsalted homemade broth. With commercial stock, salt only at the end, after the rice has absorbed liquid.
- YieldTwo and a half quarts of broth plus the tomato juice and the solids, less whatever boils away over an hour or more on the stove; expect somewhere between two and a half and three quarts, serving eight as a first course.
Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, compiled The International Cook Book (1906). The family of names is telling: French cookery has long attached bonne femme — the goodwife — to dishes of plain domestic construction, vegetables cut small and simmered in broth, and bonne-dame reads as a courtlier variant of the same idea. The phrase is also the common French name for orach, the leafy garden green once grown in kitchen plots, though no orach appears here. What the recipe really shows is the professional habit of the period applied to a homely soup: the scrap of veal and ham for depth, the vegetables scooped into identical pearls, and Parmesan passed separately at the table.