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Potage, Porto Rico
Finely slice a carrot, two onions, two branches celery, a branch parsley, six fresh okras, three sound bananas, and quarter pound raw, lean ham. Heat one and a half tablespoons butter in saucepan, add above articles and gently brown for ten minutes, stirring once in a while, sprinkle over two tablespoons flour and stir while heating for three minutes. Pour in a quart crushed fresh or canned tomatoes and two quarts broth, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, lightly mix and let slowly boil for an hour. Remove, press potage through sieve into a basin, then through Chinese strainer into another saucepan and set on the fire. Add milk and grated white part of a cocoanut, mix well, let boil for ten minutes, pour soup into a tureen and serve.
A thickened, sieved vegetable soup in the French manner, dressed with tropical ingredients. The method is roux-and-broth technique applied to okra, banana and coconut, and it works if you treat the puréeing stage seriously.
- The milk is unmeasuredThe final step says only "add milk" with no quantity. Three quarts of liquid go in and an hour's slow boil will reduce that somewhat, so a cup to a cup and a half is in keeping with the style, added off a hard boil so it does not catch.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the fine conical strainer. The recipe wants two passes: first forcing the solids through a coarse sieve with a ladle or pestle, then a second pass through the chinois to catch okra fibre and coconut grit. Skipping the second pass leaves the soup stringy.
- Grated white part of a cocoanutThe white meat of a mature brown coconut, grated fine — not the sweetened desiccated flake sold for baking, which will make the soup cloying. About four ounces of fresh or frozen unsweetened grated coconut is the right order. Canned coconut milk is a different thing, though half a cup of it stirred in at the end is a reasonable substitute for both the milk and the grated meat.
- Bananas"Sound" means firm and unbruised. Ripe yellow bananas will collapse into sweetness during the hour's simmer; slightly underripe fruit, or green plantain, holds up better and keeps the soup savoury. Either way the fruit is going through a sieve, so appearance does not matter.
- Raw, lean hamAn uncooked cured ham — prosciutto-style or a raw country ham end. A quarter pound of it is the soup's main salt source alongside the added teaspoon, so taste before seasoning further.
- OkraSix pods browned in butter at the start is deliberate: the initial fry and the long simmer break down the mucilage, and the sieving removes what remains. The okra is here as a thickener and a flavour, not as a visible vegetable.
- Gentle browningTen minutes of colour on the vegetables and ham, then three full minutes on the flour, is what separates this from a pale purée. Do not rush the flour stage or the soup will taste raw and pasty.
- YieldAbout three quarts of liquid go in, rather less after the hour's boil and straining, so roughly eight to ten servings as a first course.
The spelling "Porto Rico" was the official United States rendering of the island's name from the 1898 annexation until Congress restored Puerto Rico in 1932, though the older spelling lingered in print for some years after. The recipe belongs to a genre of American hotel cookery in which a French mother technique — brown the mirepoix, sprinkle flour, moisten, simmer, pass through the chinois — was fitted out with ingredients from a newly acquired territory and given that territory's name. Okra, banana and coconut are all genuinely Puerto Rican pantry staples, but the roux, the sieve and the two-stage straining are Escoffier-era restaurant kitchen, and the finished soup is closer to a potage purée than to anything a home cook in San Juan would have recognised.