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Potage, St. Nazaire
Brown two finely chopped white onions in a large saucepan with two ounces butter for eight minutes, add two sliced leeks, one branch each parsley and chervil, a sprig each thyme and bay leaf, a clove, sprig marjoram, and brown for five minutes, lightly mixing meanwhile; then add one ounce flour, mix well, moisten with one and a half quarts white broth, one quart fresh, crushed tomatoes and one pint water. Season with a level tablespoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, mix well and let boil for twenty-five minutes. Add two pounds clean, fresh fish bones and let slowly cook for forty minutes, press through sieve into a basin and then through Chinese strainer into a saucepan. Place on the fire and as soon as it comes to a boil, dredge in three ounces of tapioca, continually mixing while adding it, let boil for fifteen minutes, mix at the bottom once in a while, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A classic French restaurant soup: an aromatic tomato base thickened first with a little roux and then with tapioca, given depth by a fish-bone infusion. A few of the timings and terms need translating.
- Don't overcook the bonesForty minutes is longer than most modern kitchens simmer fish frames; the usual guidance is twenty to thirty minutes, beyond which stocks are commonly said to turn bitter or gluey. Keep it below a rolling boil and skim.
- White brothA light, uncoloured stock made from veal or chicken bones and white mirepoix, with no browning. An unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute, since the recipe already carries a full tablespoon of salt.
- Chinese strainerA chinois: the conical fine-mesh strainer. The two-stage straining is deliberate, so pass through an ordinary sieve first to catch the bones and vegetables, then through the chinois for clarity. Do not force fish bones through either one.
- The herbsParsley, chervil, thyme, bay, marjoram and the clove are all meant to be pulled out later. Tie them into a bouquet garni rather than letting loose leaves circulate, since everything is strained anyway.
- TapiocaPeriod tapioca for soups meant the small pearl or granulated kind, dredged in slowly so it does not clump. Three ounces is roughly half a cup and will thicken the soup noticeably; fifteen minutes of simmering is what clears the pearls from white to translucent. Modern instant tapioca sets far faster and in far smaller quantity.
- SaltA level tablespoon is calibrated to an unsalted house broth. With commercial stock, add a third of it at the start and correct at the end.
- TomatoesA quart of crushed fresh tomatoes is roughly two to two and a quarter pounds. Out of season, a 28-ounce tin of good crushed tomatoes with their juice runs a little short of a quart but is close enough.
- YieldAbout three quarts of liquid go in, and rather less than that comes out after the long simmer; figure eight or so as a first course. It thickens further as it stands; loosen with hot broth rather than water when reheating.
Potage is simply the French word for a soup served at the opening of a meal, and in the grand-hotel kitchens of the period a potage often carried a place name. Saint-Nazaire sits at the mouth of the Loire on the Atlantic coast, a fishing and shipbuilding port, which may suggest a background to the fish-bone infusion underpinning what is otherwise a tomato and leek soup, though the connection is inference rather than record. The construction is thoroughly of its time: brown the aromatics, bind with a spoonful of flour, extract flavour from bones that would otherwise be waste, strain twice for absolute smoothness, then finish with tapioca. Tapioca-thickened potages were a fixture of turn-of-the-century French service menus, valued because they gave body without cream and held their texture in a tureen. The name should be read as a menu label in the classical manner rather than as evidence of a specific Breton village dish.