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Potage, Dobruska
Place in a saucepan one and a half quarts each water and white broth, with one gill white wine. Tie in a bunch two leeks, two branches each celery and parsley, one branch chervil, and add to broth.
Thoroughly wash and drain four ounces barley, add to soup with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, then let slowly boil for one hour and forty-five minutes. Remove bouquet, pour soup into tureen, and serve with six slices toasted French bread separately.
A clear barley soup of the old restaurant repertoire, thin, herbal and quietly rich. Two things need attention: what "white broth" meant, and how long barley actually needs.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. The wine here is seasoning, not body, so a dry white with some acidity does more for the soup than an oaked one.
- White brothAn unclouded, uncoloured stock from veal or poultry bones blanched rather than roasted. A good unsalted chicken stock stands in; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which defeats the pale look of the soup.
- Four ounces of barleyA little over half a cup of pearl barley. Rinse until the water runs clear, or the soup goes cloudy and slightly gluey.
- The cooking timeAn hour and three-quarters is far longer than modern pearl barley needs; it is usually tender in roughly 30 to 50 minutes and may break down into starch before the original time is up. Taste at 40 minutes.
- The bouquetTie the leeks, celery, parsley and chervil with kitchen string, leaving a long tail to fish it out. Split and wash the leeks thoroughly first; grit will not settle out of a broth this thin.
- ChervilRarely stocked and short-lived once cut. If unavailable, use a little tarragon plus extra parsley rather than doubling the parsley alone, which loses the faint anise note.
- SaltA full teaspoon assumes unsalted broth. With commercial stock, hold the salt until the barley is cooked and the liquid has reduced.
- Yield and serviceAbout three quarts before reduction, six generous servings, matching the six slices of toast. The recipe directs that the toasted French bread be served separately, which keeps it crisp.
The International Cook Book belongs to the era when a professional kitchen catalogued soups by the dozen, each distinguished from the next by a single garnish or grain and given a proper name to fill out a printed menu. Names like Dobruska point outward to Central Europe, where barley soups thickened with root vegetables and finished with a little wine are long-established household cooking; the specific attribution here is a menu convention rather than a documented origin. What matters technically is the category: this is a potage, the general French term for soup, kept pale by using white stock and a bundle of vegetables tied in a bunch so that it flavours without colouring. The separately served toast is the same logic that gives a consomme its croutons on the side, and it marks the recipe as restaurant writing rather than family writing.