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Potage, Marie Louise
Place in a saucepan one each sliced carrot and onion, two each sliced leeks and branches celery, two branches parsley, one branch chervil, one bay leaf, one clove, a sprig thyme, two pounds clean fish bones, two and a half quarts water, a half teaspoon pepper, two teaspoons salt, and let gently boil for forty-five minutes. Mix in a saucepan one ounce butter with two and a half ounces flour, thoroughly stir and let heat for one minute. Strain the broth through a cheesecloth into this pan, add a saltspoon grated nutmeg and half teaspoon curry powder, mix well until it comes to a boil, then let boil for forty-five minutes, being careful to skim the fat from the surface and mixing quite frequently meanwhile. Open twenty-four fresh mussels and place them with their liquor in a saucepan with one gill white wine. Boil for five minutes, strain the broth through a cheesecloth into the soup, add one gill cream, mix a little and boil for five minutes; dilute one egg yolk with a quarter gill cream and add to the soup; mix well while heating for three minutes. Cut the mussels in two, add to soup, pour into a tureen and serve.
A classic fish velouté finished with mussels and an egg-yolk liaison. The whole thing hinges on the last step: once the yolk goes in, the soup must not boil again or it will curdle.
- The liaisonHold the soup below a simmer, around 180F, for the three minutes after the yolk and cream go in. Temper the yolk with a ladle of hot soup before adding it, and take the pan off direct heat while you stir.
- Old measuresA gill is half a cup, so the white wine and the cream are each 1/2 cup, and the quarter gill for the yolk is 2 tablespoons. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon.
- "Branches"A branch of celery is one stalk, and a branch of parsley or chervil is a sprig. Fresh chervil is seasonal and often unavailable; a little extra parsley with a few fennel fronds is the nearest thing, though the anise note will be different.
- Fish bonesTwo pounds of frames and heads from lean white fish — sole, flounder, cod, halibut — bought from a fishmonger. Rinse until no blood shows and skip salmon, mackerel or bluefish, which turn the stock oily and strong. Forty-five minutes is longer than modern practice; 25 to 30 minutes extracts everything useful and avoids bitterness.
- The roux and the second boilOne ounce butter to two and a half ounces flour is a dry, stiff roux by modern proportions; it works, but add the strained broth in stages and whisk hard to avoid lumps. The second 45-minute cooking is there to cook out the raw flour and reduce the soup — keep it at a bare simmer, skim, and expect to lose a fair amount of volume.
- MusselsBuy them closed and heavy, scrub and pull the beards just before cooking, and discard any that stay shut after steaming. Rather than opening them raw as written, steam them in the wine until they gape, five minutes at most; longer and they shrink and toughen. Let the liquor settle before straining so the grit stays behind.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of curry powder in this quantity is a background warmth, not a curry flavor. Salt at the end — the mussel liquor is already salty and the soup reduces twice.
- YieldAbout two quarts finished, serving six to eight as a first course; twenty-four mussels cut in two give about six halves per bowl.
French kitchen practice named soups and garnishes after people, and Marie Louise is usually taken as Napoleon's second wife, the Austrian archduchess he married in 1810; a cluster of dishes carrying her name entered the repertoire in the nineteenth century, and cooks were not always consistent about what the label guaranteed. In classic garnish lists the name is generally associated with creamed soups and with mushroom or barley garnishes rather than shellfish, so this version — a fish velouté bound with yolk and cream and finished with mussels and a whisper of curry — reflects the freedom a working chef took with such titles. The construction itself is textbook late-Escoffier-era method: a fish fumet built on a mirepoix and bouquet, thickened with roux into a velouté, then enriched at the last moment with a liaison of yolk and cream. Curry powder appearing as a mere seasoning, measured in half teaspoons, is a good marker of the period, when the spice had been thoroughly absorbed into French and Anglo-American cooking as one flavoring among many.