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Puree of Potatoes, Inouye
Place in saucepan a half pound salt pork cut in small pieces, four sliced leeks, one sliced onion, two bay leaves and one ounce butter, place pan on fire and brown for ten minutes, stirring once in a while. Add six good-sized, well-washed, peeled potatoes, moisten with three pints broth and one pint water, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, gently mix, cover pan and boil rather slowly for one hour. Press through sieve into a vessel, then through Chinese strainer into another saucepan and keep on corner of range.
Plunge two ounces Japanese pearl tapioca in a pint boiling water with a half teaspoon salt and boil for forty minutes, stirring at bottom once in a while. Place on sieve and wash in cold water, then drain well and add to soup with a pint hot milk, saltspoon cayenne and half ounce butter, mix well while heating for five minutes, pour soup into tureen and serve.
A leek-and-potato soup finished with tapioca pearls, written for a coal range and a professional batterie de cuisine. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the vessels and timings need translating.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer, not anything Chinese in origin. The double straining — coarse sieve first, then chinois — is what gives the soup its velvet texture; a food mill followed by a fine mesh sieve does the same job.
- Liquid volumesThree pints broth plus one pint water is 6 cups and 2 cups, and the finished pint of milk another 2 cups: about two and a half quarts of liquid, less whatever cooks away in the hour's boiling. Serves eight to ten as a first course.
- The tapioca timingForty minutes suits the large old-style pearls that were sold dry and hard. Modern small pearl tapioca is cooked through in 12 to 15 minutes; large pearls want soaking first. Cook until translucent with no white centre, then stop, or they collapse into paste.
- Rinsing the tapiocaThe cold-water wash is not optional. It strips the surface starch so the pearls stay separate and the soup does not turn gluey when they go in.
- Salt porkHalf a pound of salt pork carries most of the seasoning. Blanch it briefly if it is very salty, and hold back the teaspoon of salt until you have tasted the strained soup — with commercial broth as well, the original quantity is often too much.
- "Corner of range"The cool end of a coal stove, where a pan sits at a bare simmer without reducing. The lowest burner setting, or a covered pan off the heat, does the same.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Cayenne at that strength is noticeable in a mild potato soup; add half and taste.
- Straining out the porkThe bay leaves and the pork pieces are caught by the sieve and discarded — the recipe never says so directly, but that is what the two strainings accomplish.
Alexander Filippini, long the cook at Delmonico's in New York, built The International Cook Book around the fashion of the day for naming dishes after people and places, and this soup follows the Escoffier-era convention exactly: a French potato-and-leek base given a proper name and a single foreign garnish to justify it. The Japanese element here is the tapioca — pearl tapioca was sometimes sold under the "Japanese" label in this period, though the cassava root it comes from is South American. Inouye was a common enough Japanese surname to serve as a label; whether Filippini had a particular person in mind is not recorded. What the recipe really shows is how thoroughly a classical French kitchen absorbed novelty: an unfamiliar starch arrives, and within a page it has been boiled, rinsed and dropped into a purée that would otherwise be an ordinary potage parmentier.