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Potage, Suzon
Place a pint dried, split green peas in a saucepan with a quart water and boil for five minutes, drain on a sieve, replace the peas in the pan with a pound ham bones, a sliced carrot, a sliced carrot, a sliced onion, two sliced leeks, a bean crushed garlic, and two parsley roots. Moisten with a pint sweet cider and two and a half heavy quarts water, season with two light teaspoons salt and half teaspoon pepper, lightly mix them, cover the pan and slowly boil for two hours, occasionally stirring at the bottom once in a while. Remove, press the soup through a sieve into a basin, then through a Chinese strainer into a saucepan, set on the fire, pour in one gill cream, one ounce butter, one light teaspoon chopped truffle and two ounces cooked rice. Mix well while cooking for five minutes, pour the soup into a soup tureen and serve with bread croutons separately.
A split pea soup dressed up in French service language: puréed twice, enriched with cream and truffle, and finished with rice. The old vocabulary hides a straightforward two-hour simmer.
- The doubled carrot"A sliced carrot, a sliced carrot" is a typesetting slip. One medium carrot is right for this quantity.
- "A bean crushed garlic"An old way of specifying a bean-sized quantity, roughly one small clove.
- Gill, quart, pintA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). The "two and a half heavy quarts" means generous quarts, so about 2.5 to 2.75 quarts of water on top of the pint of cider.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. After pressing the soup through an ordinary sieve, the second pass catches skins and fibre; a fine chinois or a doubled sieve gives the same result.
- Parsley rootsHamburg or root parsley, sold at Eastern European and some farmers' markets. If unavailable, a small parsnip plus a few parsley stems approximates the flavour, though it is a little sweeter.
- The blanch mattersThe initial five-minute boil and drain is not optional padding. It carries off scum and some of the soluble matter that makes pea soup heavy, and it keeps the finished purée cleaner in colour and flavour.
- Ham bonesA pound of bones from a cured ham, ideally with some meat clinging. A smoked hock works and will make the soup saltier; hold back some of the two teaspoons of salt until the end.
- Do not boil after the creamOnce the cream, butter and rice go in, keep the soup just below a simmer for those five minutes. A hard boil can curdle the cream.
- TruffleA teaspoon of chopped truffle finishes the soup. Truffle in oil or paste is a poor substitute here; omitting it entirely gives an honest pea soup rather than a bad imitation.
- YieldRoughly three quarts of liquid go into the pot, rather less once it has boiled two hours and been strained twice; enough for eight or so as a first course. Croutons are passed at table, not floated in the tureen.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it reflects the late-nineteenth-century hotel practice of naming soups after people: Potage Suzon, Potage Germaine, dozens of them, each a small variation on a familiar base given a woman's name and a menu line of its own. Underneath the French, this is a split pea soup of the ordinary kind, built on ham bones and root vegetables, and the two features that distinguish it are the pint of sweet cider in the moistening liquid and the chopped truffle at the finish. Cider in a pea soup invites comparison with the Norman kitchen, where cider stands in for wine in cooking pork and ham, though nothing in the recipe or the book ties the two; in any case it suits the salt of the bones. The double straining, first through a sieve and then through the chinois, is the hallmark of a professional puree soup of the period, when smoothness had to be won by hand and a soup that could be passed through a conical strainer was proof of a kitchen's discipline.