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Potage, Lucienne
Soak a pint white beans in cold water for eight hours, thoroughly drain, place in saucepan with two and a half quarts water, a sliced carrot, two branches celery, a branch parsley and bean crushed garlic. Cut two ounces salt pork or ham in very small pieces and add to beans, season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, and gently cook for one and a half hours. Heat a half ounce butter in saucepan, add two finely sliced onions and fry for five minutes, pour in one pint fresh, crushed tomatoes, mix well and cook for fifteen minutes, then pour in beans and broth and boil for twenty minutes. Remove, press potage through sieve into a basin, then through strainer into a saucepan. Finely chop the leaves from a branch tarragon and two branches chervil, add to soup with a half ounce butter, mix well, boil for five minutes, pour potage into a soup tureen and serve.
A white bean purée soup in the French style, thinned with tomato and finished with fresh herbs. Nothing here is difficult, but a few of the quantities and terms need translating.
- "Bean crushed garlic"This is almost certainly a garbled rendering of a gousse, or clove, of garlic — the French word for a clove is the same word used for a bean pod. Read it as one crushed clove; two will not hurt a soup of this size.
- A pint of dried beansMeasured by volume, not weight: about 2 cups, roughly 14 oz or 400 g of dried navy or cannellini beans. They will roughly double after soaking.
- Branches and sprigsA "branch" of celery is one rib, not the whole head. A branch of parsley, tarragon or chervil is a single stem with its leaves.
- The salt porkTwo ounces is a seasoning, not a meat course. Unsmoked salt pork or a piece of raw ham hock gives the intended flavour; bacon will make the soup taste smoked, which is not what the recipe is after.
- Cooking time on the beansAn hour and a half suits older, drier beans; modern dried beans from a fast-moving shop are often tender in 45 minutes to an hour. Test before moving on — they must be soft enough to break under a spoon, since the whole soup gets sieved.
- Salt timingThe teaspoon of salt goes in at the start here. If your beans are of uncertain age, hold it back until they have softened, then season.
- SievingThe double pass — through a sieve into a basin, then through a finer strainer into the pan — is the point of the dish, and a blender does not replace it: it leaves the skins in suspension. Purée in a food processor or mill first if you like, but push the result through a fine strainer to get the texture the recipe means. Loosen with hot water if it thickens past a pourable cream.
- The herb finishTarragon and chervil are added at the very end and boiled only five minutes for a reason. Both go flat and hay-like with long cooking, and chervil in particular loses its anise note within minutes. Chop them just before use.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Two and a half quarts of water plus the tomato, after long cooking and sieving, should leave something in the region of two quarts of finished soup — call it six to eight first-course servings.
The name follows a convention that runs right through French restaurant cookery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: a standard preparation given a woman's first name to distinguish it on a long menu. Purée soups of dried white beans were a fixture of that repertoire, usually built on a mirepoix of carrot, celery and onion with a scrap of salt pork for depth, then pushed through a tamis to a smooth cream. What marks this version is the tomato and the tarragon-and-chervil finish, both of which pull it toward Provençal cooking rather than the plainer bean purées thickened only with butter. The International Cook Book was assembled by Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, and its short, unadorned paragraphs read like a professional's working notes: no yields, no serving suggestions, and an assumption that the cook already owns a sieve fine enough to do the job.