Home › The World's Kitchen › Potage, Paysanne
Potage, Paysanne
One small sliced red carrot, one small sliced turnip, one small sliced onion, two sliced leeks, one branch sliced white celery, four small sliced cabbage leaves, all sliced exceedingly fine; two pounds lean raw rump of beef and a few beef bones.
Have three and a half quarts boiling water in a large saucepan with a tablespoon salt and a teaspoon white pepper; add the beef and the bones; cover the pan and let boil for fifteen minutes. Uncover, skim off the scum and add the above vegetables. Cover the pan again and slowly boil for two hours. Remove the beef and bones (keep the beef for to-morrow). Skim the fat from the surface of the broth. Pour the soup into a hot soup tureen, add six slices French bread toasted and serve.
A plain boiled beef broth of the French domestic kind, thickened by nothing but finely cut vegetables. The technique is simple; the details of language and proportion are what need translating.
- The knife work is the recipe"Sliced exceedingly fine" is not decorative. The vegetables are the body of the soup rather than a garnish, and fine slices distribute through the broth instead of sitting in it as chunks. Slice on a mandoline or with a very sharp knife, no thicker than a coin.
- Salt: taste before you commitA tablespoon of salt to three and a half quarts is about right for an unsalted broth, but modern coarse salts vary by nearly half in weight per spoonful. Add two teaspoons at the start and correct at the end, once the liquid has reduced.
- White celery and red carrotWhite celery meant blanched celery, grown under cover so the ribs stayed pale and mild; ordinary green celery works, and "a branch" here most likely means a single rib rather than the whole head, given the scale of the other vegetables. "Red carrot" appears to distinguish the orange table carrot from the pale yellow-white fodder carrots still grown at the time.
- Boiling, then not boilingThe initial fifteen-minute boil is there to bring the scum up fast so it can be lifted off. After that, "slowly boil" means the barest tremble at the surface. A hard boil for two hours will work the fat back into the broth and cloud it.
- Rump for broth, not for tendernessTwo pounds of lean rump gives a clean-flavoured stock, and the recipe holds the meat back for the next day rather than serving it with the soup. Ask for marrow or knuckle bones alongside; they carry the gelatine the lean meat does not.
- The fatSkimming hot fat off the surface with a spoon is imprecise. Chilling the broth overnight lifts the fat off in a sheet, and the soup reheats without loss, though the vegetables soften further.
- The breadSix slices of toasted French bread go into the tureen and are ladled over, not served alongside. Cut them thin, dry them well in a 350F oven so they do not disintegrate, and put them in at the last moment.
- YieldThree and a half quarts of water reduces to roughly three quarts of finished soup, serving six to eight as a first course, or six as a supper with the bread.
Paysanne means peasant, and in French kitchen language the word attached itself to a cut as much as to a dish: vegetables sliced thin and small, the way a household cook works through whatever the garden gives. The soup is the plainest form of the pot-au-feu tradition, where a piece of beef and its bones flavour a broth that becomes the first course while the meat itself is eaten separately, usually cold the following day. That double use is the point of the instruction to keep the beef, and it explains the economics of a book like this one: two pounds of rump feeds a table twice. Alessandro Filippini, who cooked at Delmonico's in New York, assembled these international entries for American households at a time when French bourgeois cookery was the assumed standard for anyone with pretensions to a good table, and a recipe like this one carried that standard into kitchens with modest budgets.