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Potage, Franklin
Heat two tablespoons melted butter in saucepan, add a small chopped onion, two chopped leeks and cook for five minutes, stirring well meanwhile. Cut two small stalks celery in small julienne strips, add to pan with two quarts of broth, two gills tomato juice, one quart water, and season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Tie together two branches parsley, one branch chervil, bean garlic, two bay leaves, and add to the soup. Cover pan, let gently boil for one hour, add three ounces Carolina rice, lightly mix and let boil for thirty-five minutes. Take up bouquet, skim fat off surface, pour soup into tureen and serve.
A clear vegetable-and-rice soup built on broth, tomato and a herb bouquet. Nothing here is difficult, but the timings and one or two of the terms need translating.
- GillsTwo gills is one cup (about 240 ml) of tomato juice. With two quarts of broth and a quart of water, that gives roughly 3.25 quarts of liquid before evaporation.
- "Bean garlic"'A bean of garlic' was a period way of saying a clove (rendering the French gousse); the printed phrase here has probably just dropped the 'of'. Add one peeled clove whole, tied into the bouquet so it can be lifted out with the herbs.
- The bouquetParsley, chervil, garlic and bay tied with kitchen string, or bundled in a square of cheesecloth. Chervil is delicate and fades fast; if you cannot find it, a little tarragon comes closer than more parsley does.
- Carolina riceA long-grain white rice, historically grown in the South Carolina lowcountry and used in the period as the generic name for good long-grain. Any long-grain white rice works.
- The rice timingThirty-five minutes will reduce long-grain rice to threads and cloud the soup. Fifteen to eighteen minutes is enough; if you want the soup to sit or be reheated, cook the rice separately and add it to each bowl.
- "Gently boil"Keep the first hour at a bare simmer with the lid ajar. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat back into the broth and defeats the skimming step at the end.
- SaltA teaspoon of salt assumes an unsalted homemade broth. With commercial stock, add none until the soup has simmered and reduced, then season at the tureen.
- YieldRoughly three quarts finished, serving eight to ten as a first course.
Naming a soup for a person was standard practice in the grand-hotel kitchens of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and cookbooks of the period are full of consommés and potages attached to statesmen, singers and financiers; the connection is usually honorific rather than historical, and there is no evidence Benjamin Franklin ate anything like this. What the recipe really shows is the house style of the era's international kitchen: a clear broth, vegetables cut to a uniform julienne, a tied bouquet lifted out before service, and a starch added late. The Carolina rice is the one genuinely American note. Carolina production fell away after the Civil War, and Gulf Coast rice from Louisiana and Texas had overtaken it well before 1900, but its name survived in cookbooks as a byword for good long-grain long after the coastal plantations that produced it had gone.