Home › The World's Kitchen › Potage, Felicie
Potage, Felicie
Slice and place in a saucepan one carrot, two onions, one leek and two branches parsley, add one tablespoon melted butter and gently brown on fire ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile; pour in a quarter pint white wine, let reduce until nearly dry, then pour in three quarts water, add two pounds very fresh clean fish bones, one bay leaf, one clove, one sprig thyme, twelve allspice, twelve whole black peppers, two branches parsley, one branch chervil and two teaspoons salt; let simmer forty-five minutes. Mix in a saucepan two and a half ounces flour with one ounce butter for one minute, strain the fish broth through a cheesecloth into this pan, mix on fire with wooden spoon until it comes to a boil, then slowly boil thirty minutes. Pour in a half pint cream and a half gill good sherry, mix well and boil five minutes. Dilute one egg yolk in a bowl with half gill milk, one saltspoon cayenne pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg, add to the soup; continually mix while heating three minutes, strain the potage through a cheesecloth into a soup tureen, add a garnishing of fish quenelles in the soup tureen, lightly mix and serve.
A classic fish velouté: a fumet built on browned aromatics and wine, thickened with a white roux, finished with cream, sherry and an egg-yolk liaison. Nothing here is difficult, but the finish is where it can be lost.
- The liaison must not boilOnce the egg yolk goes in, the soup is held below a simmer — the three minutes of "continually mix while heating" means bringing it to about 170-180F, no further. Boiling after the yolk will curdle the soup into grains no amount of straining will fix.
- Old measuresA gill is 1/4 pint, so half a gill is 1/4 cup; a quarter pint of wine is 1/2 cup and a half pint of cream is 1 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon. The flour and butter are given by weight: 2 1/2 oz flour is roughly 1/2 cup plus a tablespoon, and 1 oz butter is 2 tablespoons.
- That roux is deliberately leanTwo and a half ounces of flour to one ounce of butter is not the usual equal-weight roux; it carries far more flour than fat, enough to thicken three quarts of broth before the cream thins it back. Mix it only one minute, off any real colour; this is a white roux.
- Fish bonesUse lean white fish — sole, turbot, halibut, whiting, cod frames. Salmon, mackerel and other oily fish turn a fumet muddy and rancid-tasting. Rinse the bones well and pull the gills, which carry bitterness and blood.
- Forty-five minutes is long for fish stockModern practice stops a fish fumet at 20-30 minutes, after which the bones give up glue and bitterness rather than flavour. The longer simmer here may also be reducing the three quarts; simmer gently and skim, and taste before the full three-quarters of an hour.
- Whole spice quantityTwelve allspice berries is assertive in a fish soup by current taste — six is closer to what most palates now expect. The peppercorns and the single clove can stand.
- QuenellesFish quenelles are a forcemeat of raw white fish, egg white and cream, shaped in two spoons and poached in barely trembling salted water until they float and are just firm. Make them separately and add to the tureen at the end, as directed — they will disintegrate if boiled in the soup.
- ChervilRarely stocked; a sprig of tarragon plus a little extra parsley gives a near-enough anise note. It is a background aromatic in the stock, not a garnish.
- YieldThree quarts of broth reduced through a long simmer and finished with a cup of cream gives roughly 2 1/2 quarts — eight to ten first-course servings.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it reflects the grand-hotel repertoire of the turn of the century: hundreds of soups, sauces and garnishes catalogued by French name, many of them tagged with a personal one. Dishes titled after women — Félicie, Solange, Marguerite — were often a matter of kitchen convention, though some such names did honour real people, and it is frequently impossible to say who, if anyone, was meant. What the recipe does document precisely is the classical soup grammar of the period: potage is the general French term for soup, and the thickened kind, the potage lié, is built from a fumet, bound with a velouté roux, enriched with cream and finally lié with egg yolk, each stage named and fixed. The half-gill of sherry and the quenelle garnish are the standard finish for a fish velouté in that repertoire, and the same skeleton underlies other entries in the book with only the garnish and the name changed.