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Potage, Mongole
Soak in plenty of fresh water half pint dried, split green peas for twelve hours. Drain on a sieve and place in a small saucepan with half sliced carrot, half sliced white onion, one sliced leek, one branch sliced celery, two branches parsley, one bay leaf and one ounce lean ham cut into small pieces, or a ham bone. Moisten with one and a half quarts cold water. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper and a teaspoon sugar. Let come to a boil on the range, remove scum, cover the pan and let simmer for one hour. Meanwhile mince half carrot, half onion, one leek and one branch celery. Place them in a saucepan with a teaspoon butter, and brown to a light colour for eight minutes, occasionally stirring. Add one tablespoon flour, lightly mix; pour in a pint fresh or canned tomatoes, crushed, with a pint broth, and let simmer very slowly for one hour.
Cut into fine julienne strips one small carrot, one small turnip, one leek and one branch celery and place these vegetables in a very small saucepan with three gills water. Season with a saltspoon salt and two saltspoons sugar and slowly cook for thirty minutes.
After an hour of simmering strain through a sieve both pea and tomato soups into another saucepan, adding the vegetables of the third pan. Add two tablespoons cooked green peas and boil the whole together for ten minutes. Carefully skim off the scum, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A three-pan soup: a pea purée, a tomato velouté, and a garnish of julienned vegetables, combined only at the end. The separate cooking is the whole point, and collapsing it into one pot gives a muddier, flatter result.
- Strain, then combineThe pea and tomato bases are pushed through a sieve separately before meeting. A food mill or a blender followed by a sieve does the same work; the finished soup should be smooth apart from the julienne and whole peas.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is a quarter pint, so three gills is one and a half cups. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the julienne seasoning a quarter teaspoon salt and half a teaspoon sugar.
- Split peasHalf a pint is one cup of dried split green peas. Split peas sold today are generally cooked without a long soak; a few hours is ample, and unsoaked peas may simply want somewhat longer simmering than the hour given.
- The hamAn ounce of lean ham or a ham bone carries most of the savour. A smoked ham hock or a piece of prosciutto end works; if you leave it out, use a light stock rather than water or the pea side tastes thin.
- Brown the mirepoix properlyEight minutes to a light colour, then the flour, then the tomato. Rushing to a dark brown makes the tomato base bitter, and undercooking the flour leaves a raw paste taste that no amount of simmering hides.
- The julienneCut it fine and even, and cook it in its own small pan of lightly sweetened water. Thirty minutes is right for matchstick vegetables from a cold start; test at twenty if your strips are very fine, since they should keep some bite in the finished soup.
- Final boilTen minutes at a boil after combining is to marry the two bases, not to cook anything further. Skim the scum that rises, and check the salt then, since the pea and ham sides both concentrate.
- YieldAbout two quarts, or six to eight first-course servings. It thickens noticeably on standing; loosen with broth rather than water when reheating.
Potage Mongole belongs to the grand-hotel French repertoire of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its defining trick is the marriage of two purées: a split-pea Saint-Germain and a tomato base. Why it is called Mongole is not documented; one guess is that the name is a fanciful reference to the dusky rose colour the two purées make together, in the same spirit as the many other soups of the period named for places their cooks had never been. The dish outlived its origins in an odd way, becoming a standard American convenience dish once condensed soups were sold by the can, where mixing a tin of tomato with a tin of pea and thinning with milk or sherry was widely printed as "Mongole soup." The version here has three separate pans and hand-cut julienne.