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Potage Printanier
Prepare and strain a consomme into another saucepan. With a small Parisian potato scoop take out all you can from two medium, scraped carrots and two peeled, sound turnips, and place in a small saucepan with half pint of the consomme and half pint hot water. Season with two saltspoons salt and boil for thirty minutes, then add all the contents of the pan to the consomme; add also two tablespoons of cooked green peas, two tablespoons of cooked string beans, cut into half-inch pieces, two leaves of clean lettuce and two leaves of clean sorrel, both cut into julienne strips; lightly mix, then boil for ten minutes and serve.
A clear spring vegetable soup that stands or falls on the consommé beneath it. The book assumes you have already made one; count on about two quarts of well-clarified, well-seasoned stock for a soup of this size.
- Parisian potato scoopThis is a small melon baller, the French cuillere parisienne, commonly around 15-25 mm across. The point of scooping carrot and turnip into small uniform spheres is uniformity in the bowl; a small paring knife turning them to olive shapes does the same work.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two is half a teaspoon for the vegetable pan alone. Salt the consommé separately and taste at the end, since clarified stock reduces and concentrates.
- Thirty minutes is too longThirty minutes is a long time -- balls of scraped carrot and turnip that small are usually tender in eight to twelve minutes at a gentle simmer. Longer boiling risks softening them into the cooking liquid, which is then tipped whole into the clarified consomme.
- SorrelSorrel is a sharp, lemony leaf sold at farmers' markets in spring and rarely at supermarkets. If you cannot find it, a few spinach leaves with a squeeze of lemon at the end approximate the effect, though not the character.
- Add the greens lastLettuce and sorrel need under a minute. Sorrel in particular turns olive-drab with prolonged heat and loses the freshness of its flavour, so slip both in off the boil just before serving rather than boiling ten minutes as written.
- Peas and beansThey go in already cooked, so they need only warming through. Blanched fresh or frozen peas both work; the recipe's half-inch pieces of string bean sit well against the scooped carrot and turnip.
- ClarityNever let the finished soup boil hard. A rolling boil will lift starch and vegetable debris and turn a carefully clarified consommé cloudy.
- YieldThe recipe does not state how much consomme to prepare; scale the garnish to the quantity of stock you have, allowing a modest first-course portion each.
Potage printanier is simply "spring soup," and in the classical French repertoire the name signals a clear consommé garnished with the first young vegetables of the year, cut small and cooked separately so each keeps its colour. The related term printanière is used the same way for garnishes of turned or scooped spring vegetables served with meat. The insistence on a potato scoop and julienne strips serves the dish directly: the vegetables carry no thickening and no flavour beyond their own, so the eye does much of the work. Sorrel, now a specialty green, was ordinary garden produce in kitchens of the period and appears throughout French soup cookery for the acidity it lends without vinegar or lemon.