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Potage, Soisson
Soak a pint dry white beans in plenty of cold water for six hours at least. Drain, place in a saucepan with two ounces salt pork cut in small pieces, half pound mutton bones, a sliced each carrot and onion, two bay leaves, one bean garlic and two cloves. Moisten with three quarts water, season with two teaspoons salt and half teaspoon pepper, cover pan and let simmer for two hours, mixing once in a while, remove and press pieces through sieve into a vessel. Remove stalks and stale leaves from a quart fresh sorrel, thoroughly wash in plenty of cold water, drain and finely slice in julienne shape. Place in a saucepan with three-quarters ounce butter and cook on a brisk fire for ten minutes, stirring once in a while. Pour puree in pan, mix well, add a pint milk, let boil for fifteen minutes, remove, pour puree into a soup tureen and serve with six slices toasted French bread.
A dried-bean puree finished with sorrel, from a 1929 compendium that translates French kitchen French rather loosely. Two phrases need decoding before you start, and the milk at the end wants care.
- "One bean garlic"A literal rendering of une gousse d'ail — one clove of garlic, not a head. Peel it and drop it in whole.
- The mutton bonesHalf a pound of bones, ideally with a little meat still on them. Lamb bones are the ready substitute; the flavour is milder but the gelatine is comparable. If you skip them, the soup loses body, so use a well-made stock in place of some of the water.
- Sieving"Press pieces through sieve" means the whole solid contents — beans, pork, vegetables — worked through a fine sieve or food mill. Fish out the bay leaves, the cloves and the bones first, or you will be picking splinters out of the puree. A blender is faster but gives a slicker texture; a food mill on the medium plate is closest to the original.
- How much sorrelA quart of leaves, loosely packed, is roughly 3 to 4 ounces. It collapses to almost nothing. Sorrel is seasonal and rarely stocked; spinach with a squeeze of lemon approximates the colour, if not the sharpness.
- Cook the sorrel in a non-reactive panSorrel is acidic enough to take on a metallic taste and a grey cast in bare cast iron or unlined aluminium. Stainless or enamelled is the pan to use, and ten minutes on a brisk fire really means until it has melted to a dull-green puree.
- The milkSorrel's acidity will curdle milk held at a rolling boil for a quarter of an hour. Add it, bring the soup barely to a simmer, and hold it there for the fifteen minutes; if it does break, sieving or a quick blitz will improve the texture, though it will not wholly undo the curdling.
- SaltTwo teaspoons goes in at the start alongside the salt pork. Use half, and correct at the end once the liquid has reduced over the two hours' simmering.
- YieldSix slices of toasted bread is the clue: six servings, as a first course.
Soissons, north-east of Paris in the Aisne, gave its name to a large white haricot well known in nineteenth-century French cooking — a potage Soissonnais meant a white bean soup the way a potage Crécy meant carrot. The beans supply starch and the sorrel the sharp green note that keeps a heavy puree from going flat, a job later cooks hand to lemon or vinegar. Sorrel was a kitchen-garden staple in France and Britain long before it became a specialist item, which is why a book like this can call for a quart of it without comment. The mutton bones and two ounces of salt pork are the whole meat content — flavouring, not substance.