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Puree of Potatoes, Chiffonnade
Cut a quarter pound raw, lean salt pork in small pieces, place in a saucepan with one sliced onion, two sliced leeks and one bay leaf; add one tablespoon butter and gently cook for ten minutes, stirring once in a while, then add four good-sized, peeled, raw potatoes cut in thin slices. Moisten with one and a half quarts broth and one quart water, season with one and a half teaspoons salt and half teaspoon pepper, lightly mix, cover pan and let slowly boil for one hour and fifteen minutes. Remove, strain soup through sieve into a vessel and keep until required. Remove stems, thoroughly wash and drain a half pint each spinach and sorrel and also wash green leaves from a head of lettuce, finely slice and place in a saucepan with an ounce good butter. Set pan on the fire and cook rather briskly for ten minutes, stirring frequently. Strain potato puree through a Chinese strainer into this pan, add a pint milk, teaspoon chopped parsley and the leaves from a branch chervil, thoroughly mix, let boil for ten minutes, pour soup into tureen and serve.
A potato soup finished with a briefly cooked mix of spinach, sorrel and lettuce. The method is French even if the book files it as international, and most of what needs translating is equipment and vocabulary.
- ChiffonnadeHere the word means the shredded greens themselves, not a knife cut applied to the potatoes. The soup is a potato puree with a chiffonnade of spinach, sorrel and lettuce stirred through it.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the cone-shaped fine mesh strainer, pressed through with a ladle or pestle. A blender or stick blender followed by a pass through an ordinary fine sieve gives the same smooth result in a fraction of the time.
- Salt porkQuarter pound of raw lean salt pork, not smoked bacon. Modern salt pork is often very salty; taste the broth before adding the full teaspoon and a half of salt, and consider blanching the pork a minute if it is heavily cured.
- SorrelRarely stocked in supermarkets but easy to grow and common at farmers' markets in spring. Its sharpness is the point of the garnish; if you cannot find it, more spinach plus a squeeze of lemon at the end approximates the acidity, though not the flavour.
- The greensTen minutes of brisk cooking in butter is aimed at wilting and softening, not browning. Sorrel collapses to a khaki puree almost immediately, which is normal.
- Milk at the endOnce the pint of milk goes in, keep the pot at a bare simmer. Sorrel is acidic enough to curdle milk over a hard boil, and the ten minutes specified is more than enough to warm it through.
- Cooking timeAn hour and a quarter for thinly sliced potatoes in liquid is longer than needed to cook them through; they will be falling apart well before that. The long boil also gives the broth time to take on flavour from the pork and aromatics.
- YieldTwo and a half quarts of liquid plus a pint of milk, less whatever boils away over an hour and a quarter, gives something in the region of two and a half to three quarts of finished soup, enough for eight or so first-course servings.
- ChervilSold fresh only sporadically and it loses everything when dried. Flat-leaf parsley with a pinch of tarragon is the usual stand-in.
Potato soup thickened with nothing but the potato itself, then given a garnish of green herbs and salad leaves, is a fixture of French home and restaurant cooking, and the combination of leek, potato and shredded greens is close kin to the soups the classical repertoire files under potage santé and its relations. Sorrel had a real place in that tradition as a kitchen source of acidity, grown in ordinary gardens and used to cut the richness of butter, cream and pork. The salt pork base suggests frugal origins — a soup built on cured fat, root vegetables and whatever green leaves the garden offered, including lettuce leaves that might otherwise be passed over. Compilations of this kind, gathering international recipes for American households in the early twentieth century, often kept the French technical vocabulary intact, which is why the reader is expected to know what a Chinese strainer is and to recognise chiffonnade without explanation.