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Potage, Jackson
Heat in a small saucepan half ounce butter, add three sliced, well-cleaned leeks, half a medium sliced onion, two ounces lean salt pork, cut into small squares, and two sprigs bay leaves. Stir well with a wooden spoon and brown to a nice light colour for eight minutes, occasionally stirring. Add eight medium, peeled and sliced raw potatoes; moisten with two and a half quarts hot water and half pint cold milk. Season with a tablespoon salt, one teaspoon white pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg; lightly mix. Cover the pan and let gently boil for fifty-five minutes. Strain through a fine sieve into another saucepan, boil for five minutes, add one gill cream and half ounce good butter; divide into small bits; mix well for one minute. Pour into a hot soup tureen and serve with bread croutons.
A leek-and-potato soup in the Delmonico manner, thinned with water rather than stock and finished with cream and butter. Two things need attention before you start: the salt and the sieve.
- The saltA tablespoon of salt on top of two ounces of salt pork will overwhelm the finished soup, which reduces further during the final five-minute boil. Start with a teaspoon, taste after straining, and correct at the end.
- Salt porkModern salt pork can be very salty. Blanch it a minute in boiling water and drain if you want the pork flavour without the full brine, then brown as directed.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon; half a pint of milk is one cup.
- "Two sprigs bay leaves"Bay does not come in sprigs in a modern kitchen. Two dried leaves, removed before straining, is the intent.
- Cleaning the leeksSlice first, then wash the slices in a bowl of water and lift them out, leaving the grit at the bottom. Whole leeks trap sand between the layers no matter how well you rinse the outside.
- Browning"A nice light colour" means blond, not caramelised. Eight minutes over medium heat with the lid off; dark leeks turn the soup grey and bitter.
- The cooking timeFifty-five minutes is longer than sliced potatoes need; they collapse in 25 to 35 minutes at a bare simmer. Cook until they crush against the side of the spoon and stop.
- StrainingPushing the whole pan through a fine sieve is heavy work and the point of it is texture, not clarity. A food mill or a few pulses with a stick blender does the same job; avoid a high-speed blender, which turns potato starch gluey.
- FinishingAdd the cream and butter off the boil, whisking the butter in a bit at a time so it emulsifies rather than pooling. Do not let it boil again after the cream goes in.
- YieldRoughly two and a half to three quarts depending on how much boils away, serving eight to ten as a first course. The recipe scales down cleanly by half.
This belongs to the large family of French leek-and-potato soups descended from potage Parmentier, named for Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the eighteenth-century agronomist generally credited with persuading the French to eat potatoes. Chilled and further enriched, the same formula becomes vichyssoise. The name "Jackson" tells you more about the book than the soup: Alexander Filippini spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, where the house habit was to attach the name of a patron, a colleague or a public figure to a dish, and his cookbooks are full of such dedications with no surviving explanation of who was meant. Note too that the soup is moistened with hot water rather than stock, with milk and cream doing the enriching at either end. Period vegetable potages were variously built on water or white stock, and here the choice of water is why the seasoning, the salt pork and the final butter carry the whole flavour.