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Potage Bresilien with Cherries
Crack, remove and carefully peel thirty Brazil nuts. Pound in a mortar to a fine pulp, transfer to a large saucepan with six finely chopped shallots, two branches parsley, one branch chervil, three branches sliced crisp white celery and one pound very clean raw chicken bones; moisten with two quarts white broth and one quart milk; season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Place on fire and gently boil one hour, remove, press soup through a sieve into a basin, then through a Chinese strainer into another saucepan.
Remove stems and stones from a pint fresh, ripe cherries, add them to the soup with half gill good sherry, a half pint milk, and boil forty minutes more. Dilute one egg yolk with a half gill cream, add to soup with a half ounce good fresh butter, mix while heating for five minutes but do not allow to boil, remove, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A rich nut soup in the old French service style, finished with a yolk-and-cream liaison. Nothing here is difficult, but the measurements are period ones and the last five minutes decide whether it succeeds.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the yolk and cream go in, the soup must not boil — hold it around 170-180F, stirring, until it thickens slightly. A single boil curdles the yolk and leaves grainy threads through an otherwise velvety soup.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of sherry and half a gill of cream are 1/4 cup each. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon: two saltspoons of cayenne is 1/2 teaspoon, which is assertive even in the three-plus quarts of liquid here — start with half that if you are unsure.
- White brothThis means a pale unsalted stock, veal or chicken, made without browning the bones. Use a light low-sodium stock; a dark roasted one will muddy both the colour and the nut flavour.
- Brazil nutsThirty shelled nuts is roughly 5-6 oz. The skins come off far more easily if the nuts are covered with boiling water for a minute or briefly warmed in a low oven. In place of the mortar, a food processor works, but pulse — run it too long and you get nut butter.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the fine conical sieve. The double straining is the point: coarse sieve first to break down the pulp, then the fine cone to catch every gritty fragment of nut and bone.
- Cherries and the second boilForty minutes of boiling after the cherries go in will reduce the soup considerably and cook the fruit to nothing. Twenty minutes at a bare simmer is enough to draw out the flavour; if you want the cherries visible, hold a few back and add them at the end. Sour cherries give a sharper, better balance than modern sweet varieties.
- Chicken bonesRaw bones added to already-made stock are there for body and gelatin. Backs, wings or necks all work; strain them out with the solids and discard.
- YieldAbout three quarts before reduction — eight to ten servings as a first course.
The International Cook Book belongs to the era when a French kitchen vocabulary was standard in American hotels and restaurants, and its long run of potages follows classical naming convention: a soup is titled for the ingredient that identifies it, and "Brésilien" here signals the Brazil nut rather than anything Brazilian about the method, which is thoroughly French — an aromatic infusion, a double straining, and a finish with egg yolk, cream and butter. Brazil nuts were largely a wild-gathered import from the Amazon, arriving in North America in quantity through the nineteenth century and said to have been associated in many households with Christmas nut bowls rather than cookery, so a chef using them as the base of a soup was making a deliberate show of an expensive novelty. Pairing them with fresh cherries and sherry places the dish squarely in the summer repertoire of a large kitchen with a mortar, a chinois and someone with an hour to spend peeling nuts.