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Potage Sante
Have in a saucepan three ounces lean salt pork cut into small pieces, one sliced white onion, three small sliced leeks, two sprigs bay leaf and one tablespoon melted butter. Place the pan on the fire, stir with a wooden spoon and cook until a nice golden colour; add six large, peeled, well-washed and sliced raw potatoes; moisten with two and a half quarts hot water; season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix all well together; cover the pan and let slowly simmer for forty-five minutes. Carefully clean and suppress the stalks of one quart fresh sorrel, cut into thin slice. Place in a saucepan with half ounce butter and briskly cook for five minutes, continually mixing with a wooden spoon. Then strain the puree into the sorrel pan through a Chinese strainer; mix all well together and let boil for thirty minutes; add a pint cold milk; mix again and let it come to a boil; then add one egg yolk beaten up in half a gill cream; mix well, heat without boiling for two minutes. Pour into a hot soup tureen and serve.
A French potato-and-sorrel purée finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. Two things carry it: the sorrel must not be scorched or stewed to death, and the finished soup must never boil once the yolk goes in.
- The liaisonBeat the yolk with the cream, then temper it with a ladle of hot soup before it goes into the pan. Held below a simmer for two minutes it thickens and gloses the soup; at a boil it curdles into threads and cannot be brought back.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of cream is 4 tablespoons. A saltspoon is a scant quarter teaspoon.
- Chinese strainerA chinois — the fine conical strainer. A food mill or a blender followed by a fine-mesh sieve does the same work; the point is a purée with no potato lumps or leek fibre.
- "Two sprigs bay leaf"Bay is usually met as loose dried leaves; one or two of them is the intent, and they should be fished out before pureeing.
- Sorrel and the long boilThirty minutes of boiling after the sorrel goes in was standard for period practice, but it turns the leaf drab olive and flattens the acidity that gives the soup its name. Ten to fifteen minutes is enough to marry it; longer buys nothing.
- Pan materialSorrel is high in oxalic acid and reacts with bare aluminium, cast iron and unlined copper, taking on a metallic taste and grey colour. Use stainless or enamel.
- SaltA teaspoon of salt is added before the salt pork has given up its own. Season lightly at the start and correct at the end, after the milk and cream have gone in and dulled everything.
- YieldTwo and a half quarts of water plus a pint of milk, less what boils away, gives roughly three quarts of finished soup — eight to ten first-course servings. It reheats only gently, and will separate if boiled the second day.
Potage sante — literally "health soup" — is a leek-and-potato puree given a sharp green edge with sorrel and enriched at the last moment with egg yolk and cream. The name is traditionally linked to sorrel's reputation as a cooling spring green, though this is folk explanation rather than documented etymology. The same potato base, strained through the chinois, appears as potage parmentier without the sorrel. Sorrel itself has largely dropped out of English-speaking cooking since, which is why the soup now reads as more exotic than it was — it was a cheap, ordinary green, and the salt pork and potatoes tell you this was a household dish dressed up with cream at the end rather than a luxury one.