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Puree Faubonne, Chiffonade
Have a pint of white beans soaked in cold water for ten hours. Drain and place them in a saucepan with two cloves, one bay leaf, two small chopped onions, one sliced carrot, two leeks, four branches parsley, one ounce lean salt pork and one ounce of lean raw ham. Moisten with six pints of hot water. Season with one and a half teaspoons salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Cover the pan and let gently simmer for two hours. Then press all through a sieve, then through a Chinese strainer into another saucepan on the range, and boil for two minutes. Finely slice four clean lettuce leaves, two clean spinach leaves; place them in a frying pan with a saltspoon butter and cook on a brisk fire for five minutes, frequently tossing meanwhile, and then add to the soup; stir well with a wooden spoon, boil for one minute longer. Pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A classic French bean purée, thinned and finished with a chiffonade of greens. The method is straightforward; the archaic terms are what need translating.
- A pint of beansDry beans were measured by volume: a pint is about 2 cups, roughly 14 oz of navy or other small white beans. No yield is given in the recipe; the quantities point to something like eight servings.
- Six pints of waterThat is 12 cups. It sounds like a great deal against a pint of beans, but this is a purée that will be sieved, and the volume gives the aromatics room to work. Note that the pan is covered throughout the two hours, so little of it is lost.
- Chinese strainerA chinois — the conical fine-mesh strainer, not a colander. After the coarse sieve it catches skins and grit and is what makes the purée velvety. A fine sieve lined with a doubled square of muslin does the same job.
- Saltspoon of butterA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon. For four lettuce leaves and two of spinach that is enough to keep them moving; a full teaspoon is nearer what most pans will want.
- The chiffonade is the pointChiffonade means the greens shredded into fine ribbons. Cut them at the last moment and add them at the last moment — the single minute of boiling at the end is deliberate. Longer and the lettuce turns olive-drab and the soup loses the fresh note the garnish exists to supply.
- Five minutes on a brisk fireSliced lettuce and spinach will collapse in well under that over high heat. Toss until wilted and any water has cooked off, then stop; scorched greens will carry through the whole tureen.
- Salt pork and hamAn ounce of each is seasoning, not meat. Use a scrap of unsmoked salt pork or pancetta and a trimming of dry-cured ham; remove both before sieving if you want a clean purée, or press them through with the rest for body.
- ConsistencyAfter sieving, the soup should coat a spoon lightly. Old beans absorb more water than new, so judge it at the end — thin with stock or hot water, or reduce a few minutes longer, before the greens go in.
Faubonne is one of the named garnishes of the nineteenth-century French repertoire: a purée of white haricot beans, sieved smooth and finished with a chiffonade of lettuce and sorrel or spinach. It sits in the same family as purée Soissonnaise and purée Condé, soups classified in professional kitchens by the pulse they are built on rather than by any regional origin, and the name is generally treated as a proper noun of the kitchen rather than of a place. The chiffonade finish also suggests the older use of lettuce as a cooked vegetable, a practice often said to have persisted in French cooking after salad came to dominate its use elsewhere.