Home › The World's Kitchen › Potage, Clothilde
Potage, Clothilde
Slit twenty-four large Italian chestnuts, place on a tin and roast in the oven for fifteen minutes. Remove and shell them with a coarse towel place in a large saucepan with one ounce chopped lean salt pork, two sliced leeks, one minced onion, four branches parsley, one branch chervil, two bay leaves and one clove. Moisten with two and a half quarts hot white broth or water. Cover the pan and let gently boil for one hour, strain the broth into a basin, place the chestnuts and vegetables in a mortar, pound to a smooth paste and return the paste to the broth. Mix in the same saucepan one ounce butter and one and a half ounces flour, place on the fire for two minutes, then pour the broth with the chestnuts into this saucepan; mix well and let boil for twenty-five minutes. Peel and cut in julienne strips two small parsnips, place in a small saucepan with half ounce butter, half teaspoon salt, half teaspoon sugar and one gill water: mix a little, cover the pan, set in oven for twenty-five minutes, remove and keep hot. Add two gills cream to the soup, mix well and let boil for five minutes, strain the soup through a sieve into a basin, then through a cheesecloth into a soup tureen. Add the parsnips, with a few bits of butter, gently mix, and serve with two ounces of grated Parmesan cheese separately.
A classic French chestnut purée soup, thickened with a roux and finished with cream. Nothing here is difficult, but the ingredient prep is where the time goes.
- Chestnuts are the hingeScore each nut through the shell before roasting or they will burst; the recipe gives no oven temperature, but fifteen minutes in a hot oven loosens both shell and inner skin. Peel them while still hot, rubbing in a coarse towel, because the papery inner skin welds itself on as they cool and will leave the soup bitter and gritty. Twenty-four large chestnuts is somewhere around a pound or a little more in the shell.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. So the parsnips braise in half a cup of water and the soup takes a full cup of cream.
- White brothA light unbrowned stock — veal or chicken simmered without roasting the bones. A mild, unsalted chicken stock is the modern stand-in. Salt only at the end: the salt pork and the Parmesan both contribute.
- Oven for the parsnipsThe recipe gives no temperature; a moderate oven, around 350F, suits. Covered, with butter, salt, sugar and water, the julienne strips glaze rather than boil; check at fifteen minutes.
- Mortar and sieveThe pounding, the sieve and the cheesecloth all exist to get a texture a blender reaches in ninety seconds. Purée the drained solids with some broth, then pass once through a fine sieve if you want the silk the original is after; the cheesecloth pass is optional now.
- Watch the roux stageCook the butter and flour two minutes without colour — this is a white soup — then add the chestnut broth off the heat and whisk before returning it. A chestnut purée is starchy and will catch on the bottom, so stir the twenty-five minute simmer regularly and keep it at a bare bubble.
- Aromatics come outThe bay, clove, parsley and chervil go in whole and are strained out with the first pass. Do not pound them into the purée or the clove will dominate.
- YieldTwo and a half quarts of broth reduced and enriched gives roughly eight first-course servings. It thickens considerably as it stands; thin with hot stock when reheating.
Potages carrying proper names were a standing convention of the classical French repertoire — Clothilde, Solférino, Crécy, Germiny — though the names point in quite different directions: Crécy to a place associated with carrots, Solférino to a battle, Germiny to the Comte de Germiny, and Clothilde to a woman's name. More often than not the label attaches to a garnish or a defining ingredient, so it is best treated as a house designation rather than a biography. What identifies this one is the pairing of chestnut purée with a sweet root julienne. Chestnuts were a cheap winter starch across southern Europe long before they were a delicacy, and the specification of Italian chestnuts reflects the large sweet marroni of the American import trade around 1900 — a relevant point, since the native American chestnut was around that time beginning to succumb to blight. The International Cook Book, compiled by Alexander Filippini, a longtime Delmonico's man, collects exactly this sort of hotel-kitchen potage: labour-intensive, strained twice, and served with grated Parmesan handed separately at the table.