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Potage, Spa
Soak half pint yellow, dried beans in water for an hour, drain, and place them in a saucepan with quart crushed fresh tomatoes, one sliced carrot, one sliced onion, one sliced leek, one bean garlic, one branch chervil and three ounces raw, lean ham cut in very small pieces. Moisten with quart broth and quart water, season with teaspoon salt, teaspoon sugar and half teaspoon pepper, lightly mix and let slowly cook for one hour and forty-five minutes. Press the soup through a sieve into a basin, then through Chinese strainer into another saucepan, add half pint fresh-shelled peas and one ounce raw rice, then slowly boil for thirty-five minutes, pour into soup tureen and serve.
A Belgian purée soup that finishes as a smooth base with peas and rice suspended in it. The two-stage straining is what gives it its character, and it is the step most likely to be skipped.
- The hinge: strain twiceThe sieve breaks down the beans and vegetables; the Chinese strainer (a chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer) catches skins and fibre afterward. A single pass through a food mill or a blender leaves the soup gritty with bean and tomato skin, which is exactly what the second pass exists to remove.
- MeasuresHalf a pint of dried beans is about 1 cup; a quart is 4 cups. "Yellow, dried beans" most likely means a pale field bean — dried cannellini, flageolet or yellow-eye all work. Three ounces of ham is a thick slice, diced small.
- One bean garlicA single clove. "Bean" here reads as a literal rendering of French gousse (pod, clove) rather than a quantity of beans.
- SoakingOne hour is short by modern standards, but the beans get nearly two hours of simmering and are then pushed through a sieve, so texture is forgiven. If your beans are old, soak them several hours or they will still be chalky at the sieve.
- Peas and rice timingThirty-five minutes will reduce fresh shelled peas to grey mush and cook the rice to shreds. The ounce of rice does need 20 minutes or so to soften and thicken the soup; add the peas in the last 5 to 8 minutes if you want them green and whole. Frozen peas need 3 minutes.
- BrothA quart of broth plus a quart of water assumes a strong homemade stock. With commercial stock, use unsalted and hold back some of the teaspoon of salt until after straining, since the ham and the reduction both concentrate.
- ChervilA branch means a whole sprig, stem and all, added to the pot and strained out. Chervil is delicate and mostly lost over 105 minutes of simmering; a little chopped fresh chervil stirred in at the end restores the anise note.
- YieldRoughly two quarts after straining — six to eight servings as a first course.
Spa is a town in the Ardennes region of Belgium whose mineral springs are generally credited with giving the English language the common noun; by the nineteenth century it was a fashionable watering place. The soup itself is a straightforward French potage purée in construction — dried legumes and aromatics simmered with a piece of raw ham, sieved, then garnished with a second, fresher vegetable — and there is nothing in it unique to Spa's kitchens. The International Cook Book, like other books of the period, carries a number of dishes under place names. The raw ham cut in very small pieces is worth noting as technique, not garnish; it is there to give the purée a cured-meat backbone that stock alone will not supply.