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Puree, Faubonne
Soak in several changes of water one pint dried beans for ten hours. Drain well, place in a large saucepan with three quarts cold water, adding one sliced carrot, one sliced onion, two sliced leeks, two sliced branches celery, four branches parsley, one clove crushed garlic, two cloves, one bay leaf and three ounces lean salt pork cut in small squares. Season with one and a half teaspoons salt, half teaspoon pepper and saltspoon grated nutmeg. Cover the pan and let simmer for two hours.
Carefully strain through a sieve, pressing all the ingredients through; strain through a Chinese strainer into another saucepan and set on the fire; add one gill cold cream and half ounce butter; mix well and let boil for five minutes. Pour into a hot soup tureen and serve with bread croutons separately.
A straightforward French bean purée whose only difficulty is the sieving. A few of its measures and vessels need translating.
- The measuresOne gill of cream is half a cup. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so the nutmeg is a light grating rather than a real dose. A pint of dried beans is two cups by volume, roughly 14 oz by weight.
- Which beansThe unspecified "dried beans" are almost certainly white haricots — flageolet, cannellini or navy. Faubonne is generally a white soup; red or pinto beans will give you the right texture and the wrong colour.
- Cooking timeTwo hours suits beans of unknown age at a bare simmer. Test them: they must be collapsing, not merely tender, or they will never pass the sieve. Older beans can take three hours.
- Salt timingThe salt and the salt pork go in at the start. Older advice warns against salting dried beans early, though the effect on softening is disputed and modest at most; if your beans stall, add water and keep simmering rather than adding more heat.
- The Chinese strainerA chinois — the tall conical fine-mesh strainer. The double pass (coarse sieve first, forcing the solids through, then the chinois) is what gives the soup its texture. A blender or food mill does the first pass in seconds; still finish through the finest strainer you own, since bean skins are what make a purée gritty.
- The cream stageOnce the cream and butter go in, keep it at a lazy simmer for the five minutes. A hard boil on a starchy purée scorches the bottom of the pan and the burnt taste carries through the whole tureen.
- ConsistencySome liquid is lost over the two hours even under a lid, and a sieved purée thickens further as it stands. Thin with hot water or light stock to a pouring consistency before the cream goes in.
- YieldAbout six to eight servings as a first course. The croutons are served separately so they stay crisp; cubes of white bread fried in butter or oven-dried are both correct.
Faubonne is one of the named purées of the classical French repertoire — a purée of white beans, finished with cream, and in many nineteenth- and twentieth-century versions garnished with a fine julienne of vegetables and a little chervil. The name is generally traced to a French place-name, though the explanations offered for it are traditional rather than documented. Its presence in an international collection reflects how thoroughly the French kitchen supplied the vocabulary of soup for English-language cooks. The salt pork, the bouquet of carrot, onion, leek, celery and parsley, and the final enrichment with cream and butter are the standard framework of the era's dried-legume soups, applied to an ingredient that cost almost nothing.