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Potage, Parisienne
Cut into small squares four well-cleaned, sound leeks and one small white onion; place in a saucepan with a tablespoon butter and gently brown for ten minutes, stirring once in a while. Moisten with three quarts water, adding a half-pound piece salt pork. Tie in a bunch four branches parsley, one branch chervil, one bay leaf, one clove, a sprig of thyme, and add to the pan. Season with a level tablespoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, then let boil for thirty-five minutes. Cut in half four rather small peeled, well-washed potatoes, then slice them very fine and add to the soup with a bean chopped garlic. Mix well and boil for forty-five minutes more. Take up the lard and bouquet, then with a wooden spoon lightly mash the potatoes. Pour the soup into a soup tureen and serve.
A leek-and-potato soup built on salt pork rather than stock. Nothing here is difficult, but two words in the text will mislead a modern reader.
- "Take up the lard"Lard here is the French lard, meaning the half-pound piece of salt pork, not rendered fat. Fish it out with the herb bundle before mashing. It is good sliced thin on bread, or diced back into the bowls.
- Salt with cautionA level tablespoon of salt plus half a pound of salt pork in three quarts of water will read as very salty in modern terms. Add a teaspoon at the start and correct at the end, once the pork has given up what it will.
- "A bean chopped garlic"A lump the size of a bean, so roughly one small clove, chopped. It is a seasoning note, not a feature.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh and it fades fast when dried. A little flat-leaf parsley with a few fronds of tarragon or fennel gives a near-enough anise lift; leaving it out entirely does no harm.
- The browning stageTen minutes in a tablespoon of butter over gentle heat should soften the leeks and colour them lightly. Leeks scorch faster than onions once the sugars catch, so keep the heat low and stir more than "once in a while".
- Total timeThirty-five minutes for the leeks and pork, then forty-five more once the potatoes go in, so about an hour and twenty of boiling. That is longer than a modern potato soup needs, but the point is to reduce three quarts of water into something with body.
- Mash, do not blendThe wooden spoon is deliberate. A blender or stick mixer turns cooked potato gluey; a few passes with a spoon or a masher against the side of the pan gives a broth thickened in patches, which is what this soup is.
- YieldThree quarts of water reduced over that time serves six to eight as a first course. Butter, cream or a handful of fried bread cubes at the table are common additions, though the recipe calls for none.
Potage Parisienne is a plain leek-and-potato soup: leeks, potatoes, water, and whatever fat and salt the household had. Leeks were the great cheap winter vegetable of the northern French market gardens, sold in bundles and often called the poor man's asparagus. What marks this version as older and more rustic than the restaurant kind is that it uses no stock at all, only water and a piece of salt pork to carry the flavour, and that the potatoes are crushed with a spoon rather than sieved smooth. Cookbooks of this period kept the French terminology intact, which is how lard ended up in an English sentence meaning something quite different from what the word means in English.