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Potage, Longchamps
Heat two tablespoons butter in a large saucepan, add three finely sliced leeks, one finely sliced onion, two ounces salt pork cut in small pieces, two bay leaves, one clove and two branches parsley, then brown for ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile; add one pint well-picked and thoroughly washed leaves of sorrel, cook for five minutes longer, stirring meanwhile; then add three large peeled, sliced sound cleaned potatoes, moisten with one quart broth and two and a half quarts water, season with a teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon pepper, mix well, cover pan and gently cook for two hours, mixing once in a while. Remove, press puree through a sieve into a basin, then through a Chinese strainer into another saucepan, reset on fire, crack in two ounces vermicelli, lightly mix and boil fifteen minutes, then pour in a half pint milk, a half gill cream and a half ounce good butter, boil five minutes more, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A French potager's soup in the old style: a long-simmered vegetable base pushed through two sieves, then finished with pasta and dairy. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the instructions reflect equipment and habits that have changed.
- Sorrel firstSorrel is the point of the soup and its acid is what keeps the potato and cream from turning flat. It collapses almost instantly and turns olive-drab within a minute of hitting fat; that is normal and not a fault. If sorrel is unavailable, spinach with lemon juice added at the end approximates the colour and the sharpness, though not the character.
- A pint of leavesThe pint here measures loosely packed picked leaves, not a weight; expect only a few ounces of destemmed sorrel.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so a half gill of cream is 4 tablespoons. The half pint of milk is one cup, and the half ounce of butter one tablespoon.
- Chinese strainerA chinois: the conical fine-mesh strainer, worked with a ladle or pestle. The two-stage straining, coarse sieve then chinois, is doing the job a food mill followed by a blender does in less time. A blender alone is quicker, though it leaves in fibre that the chinois removes.
- Two hours is longer than neededPotatoes and leeks are fully soft in 30 to 40 minutes; the long, covered simmer suits a range where a pot could sit unattended. Simmer until the potatoes crush against the side of the pan, then strain.
- Crack in the vermicelliBreak the vermicelli into short lengths before adding it. Fifteen minutes will give thoroughly soft pasta in the old manner; 6 to 8 minutes is enough if you want it to hold its shape, and the soup thickens either way as the starch releases.
- The clove and bayOne whole clove, not a clove of garlic. Both it and the bay leaves should be fished out before the soup goes through the sieve, or the puree will taste medicinal.
- Salt at the endSalt pork, broth and a teaspoon of added salt together can overshoot badly, depending on how salty the pork and stock are. Season lightly at the start and correct once the milk and cream are in.
- YieldThree and a half quarts of liquid before reduction: roughly 10 to 12 servings as a first course. Halving works without adjustment.
Alessandro Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, built The International Cook Book out of the French classical repertoire he had cooked professionally, and the place-name soups of that repertoire run through it. Longchamps is the racecourse in the Bois de Boulogne, opened in the 1850s and by the end of the century a fixed point of the Paris social calendar; French kitchens attached its name to a green soup, generally traced to a puree of fresh peas or sorrel finished with vermicelli and cream. Naming a dish for a racecourse, a battle or a duchess was standard practice in the grand kitchens, and told a diner nothing about the ingredients except that the house considered the dish worth a name. What is genuinely old here is the sorrel: a sharp perennial green that was a kitchen-garden staple across northern Europe for centuries, valued precisely because it supplied acidity in a soup before lemons were cheap, and which fell out of American use for reasons often said to lie in the narrowing of commercial vegetable growing to what ships well.