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Potage, Livonien
Finely slice a carrot, a turnip, two branches celery, two leeks, two white onions and two branches parsley. Place in saucepan with an ounce butter and gently brown for ten minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile, then moisten with two and a half quarts broth, adding three ounces raw rice. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper and let boil for one hour. Press the soup through sieve into another saucepan, pour in a gill cream, then continually mix until it comes to a boil, pour into a soup tureen with bread croutons and serve.
A straightforward puréed vegetable-and-rice soup of the kind that filled the first course of a hotel dinner. Two details matter: the vegetables are sweated to colour, not just softened, and the cream goes in only at the end.
- Gill of creamA gill is a half cup (4 fl oz). Use heavy cream; single or light cream is likelier to break when the soup is brought back to the boil.
- Quantity and yieldTwo and a half quarts of broth will lose some volume over the hour's boiling, leaving something on the order of two quarts of finished soup, or roughly eight first-course servings. Halve everything for a household pot.
- "Branches" of celery and parsleyA branch of celery is one rib; two branches of parsley means two stems with their leaves, not two bunches. The parsley is background seasoning here, not a garnish.
- Gently brown for ten minutesThe recipe wants colour on the vegetables, not just softening; the broth and rice are then added to that browned base. Sweating them pale gives a thinner, milder result.
- Raw rice as thickenerThree ounces is about a scant half cup. Any medium- or short-grain white rice works; it is there to break down and body the soup, so long-grain or parboiled rice gives less thickening. An hour at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, keeps the pot from catching.
- Pressing through a sieveA blender or immersion blender does the job in seconds, but pass the purée through a fine sieve afterwards anyway — the carrot and celery fibre is coarse enough to feel on the tongue.
- The final boil"Continually mix until it comes to a boil" means stirring constantly over moderate heat; a cream soup this thick scorches on the bottom the moment it is left alone. Bring it just to the boil and take it off.
- CroutonsSmall cubes of stale white bread fried in butter or oven-toasted. Put them in the tureen or hand them separately so they stay crisp.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt assumes an unsalted homemade broth. With commercial stock, hold the salt until after the cream goes in and season then.
Livonia was the old Baltic territory covering roughly modern Estonia and northern Latvia. Names of this sort were largely decorative: the classical repertoire produced dozens of pur u00e9e soups differing only in one vegetable or one finishing cream, and each needed a label to fill out a printed menu. The International Cook Book, compiled by Alexander Filippini, who cooked for years at Delmonico's in New York, is full of them, and the format here u2014 vegetables sweated in butter, moistened with broth, thickened with rice rather than flour, sieved and finished with cream u2014 is a standard potage pur u00e9e template of the period. Rice as a thickener was preferred to a flour roux for soups meant to taste clean and light, and it appears in classic versions of pur u00e9e Cr u00e9cy for the same reason.