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Potage, Oloronnaise
Finely slice three white onions and the white parts of three leeks, place them in a saucepan with one ounce butter, and lightly try to a nice light brown; then add one bean crushed garlic and one ounce flour, mix well and brown for five minutes. Moisten with three and a half quarts water, add two pounds knuckle of veal, one small beef marrowbone, a level tablespoon salt and a half teaspoon white pepper. Cover the pan and let simmer for two hours, remove the bones, add one teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, half a teaspoon chopped chives, the leaves from two branches chervil and the white of one egg; lightly mix, boil for five minutes, pour into a soup tureen, add six slices of toasted French bread and serve.
A clear onion-and-leek broth built on veal knuckle and marrow, thickened only slightly with flour and finished with fresh herbs. Two points in the text are printing slips worth catching before you start.
- "Lightly try" means frySweat the onions and leeks in the butter and let them take light colour. Keep the heat moderate so the flour that follows browns without scorching, which would turn the finished broth bitter and grey.
- "One bean crushed garlic"An old rendering of one clove, most likely a literal turn on the French gousse, though the derivation is not documented. Use a single fat clove, crushed, not a whole head.
- Quantities and yieldThree and a half quarts of water will lose some volume over the two hours, though the pan is covered, so the loss should be modest. The six slices of toast at the end suggest six servings.
- Skim as it simmersVeal knuckle and marrowbone throw a good deal of grey scum in the first twenty minutes. Skim it off and hold the pot at a bare tremble rather than a rolling boil, or the broth clouds and the flour scorches on the base.
- The egg whiteStirred in and boiled five minutes it coagulates and lifts a little of the haze, a rough clarification rather than a proper raft. If you want a clear soup, strain the finished potage through a fine sieve or muslin before adding the herbs.
- Chervil and chivesChervil is worth seeking out for its faint anise note, but it collapses with heat, so add it at the very end. If unavailable, use extra parsley plus a pinch of tarragon rather than dried chervil, which tastes of nothing.
- SaltA level tablespoon into three and a half quarts is about right at the start, but the liquid concentrates as it reduces. Add half at the beginning and correct after straining.
- The meatTwo pounds of veal knuckle yields enough soft meat and gelatine to be worth saving. The recipe simply discards the bones; pick the meat off, dice it and return it to the tureen, and slide the marrow onto the toast.
- ServingPut the toast in the tureen and ladle over it, as written, so it softens without dissolving. Cut the bread thin and toast it dry, not buttered.
Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York as manager and steward, filled The International Cook Book (1906) with hundreds of short numbered soups of this kind, many of them tagged with a place name in the French manner. "Oloronnaise" points to Oloron-Sainte-Marie in the Béarn, at the foot of the western Pyrenees, and the formula fits that corner of France: leeks and onions, a scrap of garlic, a veal knuckle and a marrowbone doing the work that a stock cube does now, and toasted bread put in the tureen so the soup is eaten with the loaf rather than beside it. Garnishing a broth with herbs and a beaten egg white was a quick way to lift and lighten a household potage without the expense of a full consommé clarification. Whether any cook in Oloron would have recognised the name is another matter; Filippini and his contemporaries attached regional labels freely, and many of them describe an idea of a place more than a documented local dish.