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Potage Celery, Espagnole
Scrape the roots, remove the stale branches of two stalks celery, detach the branches and thoroughly wash and wipe them, then cut them in one-inch julienne strips, place in saucepan with one finely chopped green pepper and one and a half tablespoons butter. Cover the pan, let steam on the range for ten minutes, then moisten with two quarts broth. Add two ounces raw rice and two finely chopped, peeled and seeded tomatoes, season with a teaspoon salt and three saltspoons white pepper, gently mix, then let slowly boil for forty-five minutes. Pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A clear vegetable soup thickened only by rice. Two things in the original need attention before you start: what "two stalks celery" meant in 1900, and how long rice can stand in simmering broth.
- "Two stalks celery"In this period a "stalk" is the whole head, what a supermarket sells as a bunch; the individual ribs are the "branches" the recipe tells you to detach. Two heads is right for two quarts of broth — a pair of single ribs would vanish.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three is three-quarters of a teaspoon of white pepper. That is assertive but deliberate in a soup of this size; start with half and correct at the end.
- Rice by weightTwo ounces of raw long-grain rice is about a third of a cup. It is there for body, not bulk.
- The forty-five minutesThis is the hinge. Rice held at a boil for three-quarters of an hour disintegrates and clouds the broth. Give the celery and pepper a 20-minute head start in the broth, add the rice, and simmer 18-20 minutes more; the total comes close to the original without the mush.
- Cover and steamThe first ten minutes under a lid with butter is a sweat, not a browning. Keep the heat low enough that nothing colours — the finished soup should taste green and clean.
- BrothTwo quarts of light chicken or veal stock. Modern boxed stock is saltier than a period household broth, so hold back on the teaspoon of salt until the soup has reduced a little.
- TomatoesPeeled and seeded means two ripe tomatoes, skins slipped after a few seconds in boiling water, pulp and seeds discarded. Out of season, drained canned whole tomatoes are closer to the intent than pale fresh ones.
- YieldTwo quarts of broth plus vegetables serves six to eight as a first course.
"Espagnole" on a soup card of this era often does not mean the brown mother sauce; it is generally taken as shorthand for Spanish-style, which in Franco-American kitchen French meant the presence of tomato, sweet pepper and rice à l'espagnole and countless "Spanish" rice dishes on American hotel menus. Books of this kind catalogued dozens of potages built on one base and distinguished by a garnish and a national adjective, which is how a plain celery-and-rice soup acquires a country of origin it has no particular claim to. The julienne cut, the sweat in butter under a lid, and the finish in a tureen are all straight out of professional French service, scaled down for a household with a cook.