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Potage, Jardiniere
Cut in small square pieces one each medium carrot, white turnip, medium onion, leek and branch celery, place in a saucepan with an ounce butter and cook on the fire for ten minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Moisten with two quarts broth and one quart water, add one pound shin of beef, season with a good teaspoon salt and a light half teaspoon pepper, then let slowly boil for forty-five minutes. Cut a quarter pint trimmed, fresh string beans in half-inch pieces and add to soup with quarter pint shelled fresh peas, then boil for thirty-five minutes longer. Pick leaves from two branches chervil and one branch parsley, add to the soup, and boil five minutes longer. Remove the beef. Skim fat from the surface. Pour in a soup tureen, and serve.
A clear vegetable soup built on a beef-strengthened broth, in the plain style of the French jardinière. Nothing here is difficult, but the vegetable timings belong to an era of tougher, larger produce.
- Cut the green-vegetable timeThirty-five minutes will reduce modern string beans and shelled peas to grey mush. Give the beans 6-8 minutes and add the peas for the last 3-4, or simply add both in the final ten minutes of the simmer.
- "Branch" means stalkA branch of celery is one rib, not a whole head. A branch of chervil or parsley is a single sprig.
- Quarter pintIn this book that is half a cup by volume, so roughly 2 oz of trimmed beans and about 2 1/2 oz of shelled peas. Frozen peas work and need only two minutes at the end.
- Shin of beefSold as beef shank or foreshank, usually cross-cut on the bone. A pound of it gives body and gelatin to the broth. Forty-five minutes will not make it tender to eat; the recipe treats it as a flavouring and removes it. If you want to eat the meat, simmer it separately for two to three hours and slice it into the finished soup.
- Liquid and reductionTwo quarts broth plus one quart water is three quarts going in; after nearly an hour and a half of open simmering expect appreciably less. Use unsalted or low-salt stock, since the teaspoon of salt is judged against an unsalted homemade broth.
- The sweating stepTen minutes in butter over moderate heat should soften the mirepoix without colouring it. Browning it turns the soup muddy rather than clear, which defeats the point of a jardinière.
- ChervilRarely stocked and quick to fade; it has a faint anise note. If you cannot find it, use extra parsley and a little tarragon, added off the heat so the flavour survives.
- SkimmingSkim during the simmer as well as at the end. Chilling the soup and lifting the set fat is easier still, and it reheats without loss.
- YieldServes six to eight as a first course.
Jardinière is often linked to the French for a woman gardener, though in cookery it is generally the "garden-style" sense that carries the meaning (the word also denotes a plant container); in nineteenth-century kitchen French it labelled anything cut into neat pieces of fresh garden vegetables — a garnish, a braise, or as here a soup. The formula is a fossil of a working professional kitchen: a base of carrot, turnip, onion, leek and celery sweated in butter, a broth reinforced with a cheap gelatinous cut, and then whatever the season provided in the way of beans and peas. The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and its potages section reads like a restaurant repertoire translated for domestic use — hence the tureen at the end, and hence the beef that is used for its flavour and then quietly taken away.