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Potage, St. Quen
Remove heads and tails of six fresh smelts, cut in quarter-inch pieces, place and keep on a plate. Place a pound of fish bones in saucepan with a sliced each carrot, onion and leek, two sliced branches celery, two branches parsley, a sprig thyme and two cloves. Moisten with two and a half quarts water, season with one and a half teaspoons salt and cook forty-five minutes, then strain broth through cheesecloth into a vessel. Finely chop an onion, leek, half a seeded green pepper, two branches celery, place in saucepan with an ounce butter and brown for ten minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Pour in fish broth with a half teaspoon pepper and let gently boil for fifteen minutes. Thoroughly wash and drain on a sieve two ounces Brazilian tapioca, add to soup with two gills tomato sauce, broil for ten minutes, then add smelts, lightly mix, boil for ten minutes, pour soup into tureen and serve.
A clear fish broth thickened with tapioca, in the elaborate French-American style of a hotel kitchen. Two words in the original need translating before you start, and the smelts need protecting from the clock.
- "Broil for ten minutes" means simmerThe single "broil" in the last sentence (the later instruction is already "boil") is probably either the book's loose rendering of boiling or a misprint. The soup never leaves the saucepan; keep it at a bare simmer so the tapioca clears without clouding the broth.
- The smelts are the hingeQuarter-inch pieces of smelt are cooked through in under two minutes. Ten minutes of boiling reduces them to shreds and a woolly texture. Add them off the heat at the very end, cover, and let them stand two or three minutes in the hot soup before it goes to the tureen.
- Two gillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of tomato sauce is one cup. Use a plain, unsweetened, unherbed tomato sauce or thin passata; a modern jarred pasta sauce will overwhelm the fish.
- Brazilian tapiocaThis is small pearl tapioca from cassava, sold as pearl or seed tapioca. Two ounces is roughly a third of a cup. Rinsing and draining it, as directed, removes loose starch and keeps the broth translucent.
- The fish bonesUse frames and heads from lean white fish only — sole, flounder, whiting, cod, halibut. Salmon, mackerel and other oily fish turn the broth rancid-tasting. Rinse the bones well and remove gills and any blood.
- Stock timingForty-five minutes is longer than current practice. Fish bones give everything they have in 20 to 30 minutes; beyond that the broth takes on a glue-like heaviness. Skim, do not stir, and strain through cheesecloth as written.
- Smelts todayWhole fresh smelts appear seasonally at fishmongers and in Asian and Eastern European markets, usually frozen. If none are to be had, small pieces of any firm white fish stand in, treated the same way at the end.
- YieldTwo and a half quarts of water reduce to something near two quarts of finished soup — six to eight servings as a first course.
The International Cook Book belongs to the era when a professional kitchen named a soup after a place, a patron, or a Paris suburb and let the name do the advertising; Saint-Ouen, just north of Paris, is the likeliest source of "St. Quen," though the book gives no explanation and the spelling may simply be a compositor's slip. Smelts were then cheap and abundant in both the Atlantic and the Great Lakes, sold by the pound and eaten by the plateful, so using six of them to garnish a soup looks more like thrift than luxury. The tapioca suits the period: cassava pearls, much of the supply reaching the trade through Brazil, were a favoured thickener for clear soups because they bound the liquid without the flour taste of a roux.