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Potage, Economique
Cut into julienne shape one medium-sized, cleaned red carrot, one medium, sound turnip, two leeks and two branches celery. Place them in a saucepan with half ounce clarified butter and gently brown for six minutes, occasionally mixing with a wooden spoon. Moisten with two quarts and a half of broth or hot water. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper and half teaspoon curry powder, adding three ounces salt pork-and a few chicken bones or beef bones, if on hand. Cover the pan and let slowly boil for thirty minutes, being careful to skim the fat from the surface every ten minutes. Then add four tablespoons good raw rice and two ounces Italian spaghetti cut into pieces one inch long. Cover the pan again and continually boil for forty minutes more. Take the pan off the fire and place it on a table; remove all the bones and pork, skim off the fat, pour into a hot soup tureen and serve with six small slices of toasted French bread, separately.
A thrifty vegetable soup built on scraps: bones if you have them, salt pork for depth, rice and pasta for body. Only the starch timing really needs rethinking.
- The forty-minute starchRice and one-inch spaghetti boiled together for forty minutes will disintegrate into paste. Give the soup the extra time on its own, then add the spaghetti for its package time (8-10 minutes) and the rice about 18 minutes before serving, or cook the rice separately and add it at the end.
- Quantities in modern termsTwo and a half quarts is 10 cups of stock; half an ounce of clarified butter is about a tablespoon; three ounces of salt pork is a small chunk. Four tablespoons of raw rice is a quarter cup, which is deliberately modest.
- Clarified butterUsed here because the vegetables are browned; plain butter would scorch at the edges over six minutes. Ghee, or a mix of butter and a neutral oil, does the same job.
- Salt pork and saltThe pork and any bones both season the pot. Hold back the teaspoon of salt until the pork comes out at the end, then correct — modern salt pork and commercial stock are often salty enough on their own.
- SkimmingThe instruction to skim every ten minutes matters more than it sounds: salt pork and bones throw a lot of fat, and unskimmed it will cling to the vegetables and the pasta. Keep the pot at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil so the fat gathers at the edge where you can lift it off.
- Julienne means julienneMatchsticks roughly 1/8 inch square and an inch or two long. Cut thicker and the carrot and turnip will still be firm when the starches are done.
- Curry powderHalf a teaspoon in ten cups is a background note, not a curry flavour. Any mild commercial blend works; toast it briefly with the vegetables if you want it less raw-tasting.
- Yield and servingThe six slices of toasted bread suggest six modest bowls, or four generous ones. Serve the toast alongside, not floated in the soup.
Potage économique is simply "economical soup" — a descriptive name for the pot that turns root vegetables, a scrap of salt pork and whatever bones came off yesterday's roast into a meal. Filippini's International Cook Book belongs to a generation of American cookbooks written by hotel and restaurant men who had trained in the French system, and this recipe shows the method rather than the luxury: precise knife work and careful skimming applied to the cheapest possible ingredients. The rice-and-spaghetti pairing, and the half teaspoon of curry powder, reflect the period's habit of borrowing a little from every cuisine at once; curry powder had been a standard British and American pantry item since the nineteenth century and was used as a general seasoning far more often than as the basis of an actual curry. The toasted French bread served separately, rather than in the bowl, is often said to be the older service style, which kept the crouton crisp.