Home › The World's Kitchen › Puree Conde, Aux Croutons
Puree Conde, Aux Croutons
Soak in a gallon cold water one pint dried red beans for twelve hours, changing the water three times. Finely mince one sound red carrot, one small, white onion, two leeks, two ounces salted pork, two branches fresh parsley and half a clove sound garlic. Place these ingredients in a medium-sized saucepan with half ounce butter; set the pan on a brisk fire, thoroughly stir with a wooden spoon for one minute, then let gently cook until they attain a nice golden colour, or about ten minutes, being careful to stir frequently meanwhile. Thoroughly drain the beans and add them to the pan; moisten with three and a half quarts hot water and one gill claret. Season with two teaspoons salt, half teaspoon white pepper, one sprig bay leaf and two cloves. Cover the pan and let gently boil for two hours and a half. Then press the whole through a sieve, then through a Chinese strainer into another saucepan. Boil again for ten minutes; add one-half ounce butter, divided into small bits, and a gill cream; briskly stir until thoroughly dissolved, but do not allow to boil again. Pour into a soup tureen and serve with a small plate of bread croutons separately.
A classic French red bean purée, thinned far more than modern soups and finished off the heat with butter and cream. Most of the work is in the straining, and everything else is straightforward.
- The hinge: finish off the boilOnce the butter and cream go in, keep the soup below a boil, as the recipe directs; boiling risks curdling the cream and a grainy, separated puree. Take the pan off the heat, whisk the butter in a piece at a time, then the cream, and serve.
- A gillHalf a cup, about 4 fl oz. The recipe uses two of them — one of claret in the pot, one of cream at the end.
- ClaretNineteenth-century English and American usage for red Bordeaux. Any dry, unoaked red will do; the quantity is small and it is there for depth and colour, not flavour you can name.
- Dried red beansA pint of dried beans is roughly 14 oz, or about 2 cups. Red kidney or small red beans both work. The three water changes during the twelve-hour soak are worth keeping — they reduce the indigestible sugars.
- Salt porkStill sold, usually in the bacon case, but much saltier than the two ounces here suggests. Rinse it, and hold back some of the two teaspoons of salt until you taste at the end.
- Brisk fireMedium-high to start the vegetables, then medium-low for the ten minutes of colouring. "Gently boil" for the long cook means a bare simmer with the lid on.
- Chinese strainerA chinois — the conical fine-mesh strainer. A blender or stick blender does the first pass in seconds, but push the result through a fine sieve anyway if you want the smooth texture the recipe is after.
- Liquid and yieldThree and a half quarts of water plus the beans makes a very thin soup by modern standards; there will be some reduction over the two and a half hours, and you can reduce further at the end if you want body. The recipe gives no yield, but as written it makes a large quantity — on the order of eight to ten servings.
Purée Condé is one of the fixed points of the classical French repertoire — a red bean purée, often finished with red wine, and usually distinguished from its white-bean cousin, purée Soissonnaise. The name is generally traced to the house of Condé, the princely branch of the Bourbons to whom tradition attaches a number of dishes in the escoffier-era canon, though as with most such attributions the link is traditional rather than documented. Its appearance in an international cook book of this period is unsurprising: French soup nomenclature was the professional lingua franca, and an American hostess who wanted her menu to look serious wrote it in French. The technique — a mirepoix sweated with salt pork, a long slow simmer, then the double straining and a cold-butter-and-cream liaison off the fire — is standard purée-soup practice of the era, and it is the straining rather than any ingredient that marks the dish as restaurant work rather than family cooking.