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Potage, Gasconien
Finely slice two medium, white onions and two leeks, place in saucepan with a tablespoon good leaf lard and brown on fire for ten minutes, stirring once in a while, then add four finely sliced, peeled raw potatoes, one bean crushed garlic, two branches parsley, one four-ounce piece larding pork and two bay leaves. Moisten with three quarts water, season with two teaspoons salt, half teaspoon pepper, and let gently boil for an hour and a half, lift up pork and press puree through sieve into a vessel.
Cut quarter of a very small cabbage in small pieces, place in saucepan with a pint water and teaspoon salt and boil for thirty minutes. Drain off all the water, cut pork in small square pieces, add to cabbage with a half ounce butter and cook on fire for fifteen minutes, stirring once in a while; then pour puree into pan, add a gill milk, mix well, boil for ten minutes, pour soup into tureen and serve.
A two-pot peasant soup: a potato-and-leek purée in one pan, cabbage and salt pork in the other, married at the end with a little milk. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the terms have drifted.
- A gill of milkHalf a cup. Add it at the end and keep the soup just under a hard boil once it is in, or it may curdle against the salt.
- "One bean crushed garlic"One clove, crushed. Older English-language cookbooks sometimes wrote "bean" here; whether it renders the French gousse or simply means a bean-sized amount is not clear.
- Larding porkA four-ounce piece of salt pork or unsmoked fatback with some lean in it, not bacon. If yours is heavily salted, blanch it or hold back some of the two teaspoons of salt until the end; the pork seasons the whole pot.
- Leaf lardRendered fat from around the pig's kidneys, still sold by some butchers. Ordinary lard, or a tablespoon of butter and oil together, does the same work here.
- Browning the onionsTen minutes over moderate heat should give colour without scorching. Burnt onion turns the finished purée bitter and grey rather than sweet.
- Pressing the puréeA food mill or a ricer gives the right texture. A blender will make potato gluey; if you use one, pulse briefly and stop while it is still slightly coarse.
- Three quarts of waterThat is a generous amount for four potatoes and will reduce over the hour and a half. Expect a thin soup by modern standards; if you want it thicker, simmer uncovered or use less water from the start.
- The cabbageThirty minutes of boiling is longer than modern practice usually calls for. Ten to fifteen minutes leaves the cabbage tender but still distinct, which matters since it goes back into the pan with butter and pork for another quarter hour.
- YieldAbout eight servings as a first course, or six as a supper with bread.
Gascony, in the southwest of France, is salt-pork country: the region's everyday soups are built on cured pig fat, cabbage, leeks and whatever root vegetable is at hand, with the meat lifted out and served separately or cut up and returned. This might be read as a garbure in a smoother, more genteel dress — the purée sieved, a little milk stirred in at the end. Filippini's International Cook Book gathers regional soups under short French headings, part of a long habit in American cookbooks of the period of presenting provincial French dishes as cosmopolitan credentials. The potato is the giveaway that this is a comparatively late version: it entered southwestern French kitchen gardens in earnest only in the late eighteenth century, and older garbures leaned on beans, chestnuts and stale bread instead.