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Potage, Rouennaise
Cut in half-inch squares one pound lean raw mutton, and in quarter-inch pieces two white turnips, a good-sized onion and three leeks. Place mutton and vegetables in a saucepan with an ounce butter and nicely fry for ten minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Moisten with two and a half quarts broth season with a teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon pepper, then let slowly boil for fifteen minutes. Add two ounces rice and one good-sized, peeled raw potato cut in quarter-inch squares, then let slowly boil for forty-five minutes. Add half ounce butter and half gill cream, mix well, boil for three minutes, skim fat off surface, pour soup into a tureen and serve.
A plain mutton-and-root soup finished with butter and cream. Nothing here is difficult, but the meat and the measures need translating.
- Mutton, and what to use insteadTrue mutton — an older sheep, generally reckoned at over two years, with a strong, slightly gamey flavor — is sold mainly by halal and specialty butchers. Lamb shoulder, cut in the same half-inch dice, is the practical substitute and close in fat content.
- Cooking time for the meatHalf-inch dice of lamb shoulder will be tender in the hour of simmering the recipe allows. Genuine mutton is tougher and will want another 30 to 45 minutes; add the rice and potato only in the last 45 minutes regardless, or they will collapse.
- Half a gill of creamA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is about 4 tablespoons. Use heavy cream — it is boiled for three minutes at the end, and lighter cream may separate.
- Broth quantityTwo and a half quarts is 10 cups. Unsalted or low-sodium stock is best here, since the recipe already calls for a full teaspoon of salt on top of it.
- Butter by weightAn ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; the half ounce at the finish is 1 tablespoon. The initial frying is meant to color the meat and vegetables lightly, not to brown them hard.
- LeeksThree leeks means the white and pale green only. Split them lengthwise and rinse well before dicing — grit trapped in the layers will end up in the finished soup, which is never strained.
- RiceTwo ounces is a scant third of a cup of long-grain rice. Forty-five minutes will cook it well past al dente, which is the intention: it thickens the broth slightly rather than staying separate.
- SkimmingSkimming the fat matters more with lamb or mutton than with beef, as the rendered fat is heavier and coats the palate. Let the pot stand off the heat a minute so the fat gathers, then lift it with a shallow spoon or a paper towel drawn across the surface.
- YieldRoughly two and a half to three quarts, depending on how hard it boils — six to eight first-course servings, or four as a main with bread.
Nineteenth-century French kitchen nomenclature attached place names to standard preparations as a kind of shorthand, and rouennaise points to Rouen, the old capital of Normandy. In classical French nomenclature the term is associated chiefly with Rouen duck preparations; Normandy is also dairy country, and the finish of butter and cream here may owe something to that, though the connection is inference rather than anything documented. Beyond that, the soup is a straightforward household potage of the sort that filled the soup chapters of grand-restaurant reference books of the period: cheap cuts of mutton, turnip, leek, onion, rice and potato, softened at the last moment into something worth serving at table. The prominence of mutton is itself a marker of the era: it is generally said to have receded from English-speaking markets around the middle of the century in favor of younger lamb.