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Potage, Provencal
Finely slice two medium white onions, one green pepper, six fresh mushrooms, one bean sound garlic and two leeks; place all these vegetables in a large black frying pan with two tablespoons oil, fry for ten minutes, tossing once in a while, sprinkle over two tablespoons flour, and stir well with wooden spoon for two minutes. Wipe and crush one quart fresh ripe red tomatoes, add to pan with two quarts broth, season with a heavy teaspoon salt, teaspoon sugar and half teaspoon pepper, thoroughly mix and let boil for forty-five minutes, mixing once in a while. Place twelve thin slices toasted French bread in a soup tureen, sprinkle over half teaspoon each chopped parsley and chives, strain soup through Chinese strainer into tureen and serve. (It is absolutely necessary to cook this soup in a black frying pan.)
A tomato and aromatic broth thickened with a light roux, strained smooth and poured over toast. The instructions are terse in places and one line is misleading to a modern cook.
- "One bean sound garlic"Read as one sound clove of garlic; "bean" for a single clove turns up occasionally in older cookery writing. Not a whole head.
- The black frying panA black pan here is a well-seasoned heavy steel or cast-iron skillet, valued for even heat and browning. The instruction is not absolute: an hour of acidic tomato in bare cast iron can pick up a metallic taste and dull the colour. A wide, heavy stainless or enamelled pan gives the same result with less risk.
- QuantitiesOne quart of crushed fresh tomatoes is roughly 2 lb of ripe tomatoes, or a 28 oz can of whole peeled tomatoes with their juice out of season. Two quarts of broth is 8 cups; a light chicken or vegetable stock suits it better than beef.
- "Let boil for forty-five minutes"Read this as a steady simmer. A rolling boil for three quarters of an hour will reduce two quarts of broth well past soup and can scorch the flour on the pan bottom.
- Chinese strainerA chinois — the conical fine-mesh strainer. Press the solids firmly with a ladle to extract the pulp; the vegetables are a flavouring here and are discarded, which is why the soup finishes clear-bodied rather than chunky.
- The toastToast the French bread dry and hard, and put it in the tureen only just before the soup goes in. Toast that sits in a warm tureen collapses; slices that are too soft to start with dissolve entirely.
- YieldTwelve slices of bread and two quarts of liquid serve six to eight as a first course. Season again after straining — the flour and long simmer flatten the salt.
Potage Provençal belongs to the family of southern French soups built on things the region grows in quantity: tomatoes, garlic and olive oil. Tomatoes came into the wider French repertoire later than in the south, and by the middle of the nineteenth century tomato preparations were well established in professional French cooking; in a hotel kitchen a soup named for Provence generally signalled tomatoes and garlic. The method here -- vegetables sweated in oil, dusted with flour, moistened, simmered, then forced through a chinois -- is ordinary professional practice of the period, when a soup of this type was expected to be smooth and to arrive over toast or croutons rather than served rustically with its vegetables intact. Books of this sort collected dishes under national or regional headings for American cooks and hotel stewards assembling varied menus, which is why a Provençal soup sits here beside recipes from a dozen other kitchens.