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Potage Cousinette
Finely mince a quarter of a very small, well-trimmed and thoroughly washed white cabbage, ten leaves fresh, well-washed spinach, one small carrot, one medium-sized white onion, two leeks, four branches parsley and one bean sound garlic.
Have three and a half quarts boiling water with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper, one saltspoon thyme, one bay leaf and half sprig marjoram. Add all the above vegetables, with a small cervela sausage and one ounce butter. Cover the pan and let slowly boil for two hours. Uncover, remove the sausage, majoram and bay leaf, add two small raw potatoes cut in small squares and slowly cook again for twenty-five minutes. Cut the sausage in very thin slices, add to the soup and serve.
A long-simmered green vegetable soup that needs almost nothing from a modern cook except attention to a few vanished terms and one large pot. Everything hinges on the sausage: it flavours the whole two-hour simmer and only returns at the end, sliced thin.
- Pan sizeThree and a half quarts of water plus the vegetables wants a pot of at least six to eight quarts. Keep it covered as directed to limit evaporation over the two hours.
- A bean of garlicOne clove, not one head; "bean" for a single clove turns up in period cookbooks.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon. So: 1/4 teaspoon dried thyme.
- Cervela sausageCervelas: a fat, mild pork sausage, French or Swiss, usually sold already cooked and often lightly smoked. A Swiss cervelas or a knackwurst is the closest substitute; kielbasa will do.
- Two hours is not a mistakeThis is a peasant potage, not a modern brothy vegetable soup. The cabbage, leeks and spinach are meant to collapse entirely into the liquid. Do not cut the time hoping for texture; the potatoes added at the end supply that.
- Spinach quantityTen leaves of full-sized bunch spinach is roughly two generous handfuls of the bagged leaves sold today.
- Sausage handlingRemoving it before the final twenty-five minutes keeps it from disintegrating and lets it be sliced cleanly. Slice it as thinly as you can and let it warm through in the soup rather than boiling it again.
- Seasoning at the endAll the salt goes in at the start here, before the sausage has given up its own. Taste before serving and correct; you will likely want more pepper.
- YieldSomewhere around three quarts finished, enough for eight or so as a first course, fewer as a supper with bread.
Cousinette belongs to the family of Gascon and Béarnais green soups — also found as cousinat or cousina — built on whatever leaves the garden gave up: chard, spinach, sorrel, mallow, nettle tops, cabbage. The name is usually connected to a local word for the greens themselves rather than to any cook or place, though the derivation is not settled, and the dish was ordinary rural food rather than restaurant cooking. What marks this version as a professional's rewriting is the discipline of it: measured seasonings, the herbs lifted out at the right moment, the sausage withdrawn and returned in thin slices for the plate. That is the hand of a hotel kitchen tidying a farmhouse pot, which is what much of The International Cook Book does — collecting dishes from across Europe and setting them down in the measured, orderly language of the American professional kitchen of the early 1900s.