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Puree, Parmentier
Heat in a saucepan one tablespoon butter, add one finely minced onion, six sliced leeks, half pound lean salt pork cut into small pieces, and brown for ten minutes. Add then ten medium, peeled and washed potatoes cut into slices, moisten with three quarts water, season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg; lightly mix. Cover the pan, boil for five minutes, then set in the oven for one hour and thirty minutes. Remove, press it through a sieve into a basin, replace it in the saucepan, let come to a boil, then add half pint of milk, half gill cream and half ounce fresh butter. Mix well while heating for five minutes, pour into a soup tureen and serve with a plate of bread croutons separately.
A potato-and-leek soup in the French style, built on salt pork and finished with cream. The method is sound; only the units and the oven step need translating.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the nutmeg is a modest pinch. A gill is half a cup, making the half gill of cream 1/4 cup; the half pint of milk is one cup.
- Hold back the saltHalf a pound of lean salt pork carries a great deal of sodium into three quarts of liquid. Add the teaspoon of salt only at the end, after the purée and dairy have gone in, and taste first.
- The oven stepNo temperature is given, so one has to be chosen. Treat it as a moderate oven, 325-350F, covered, for the hour and a half. The point is slow, even cooking without reduction on a hot spot, not browning.
- Wash the leeks properlySix leeks sliced is a lot of grit. Slice first, then swish in a bowl of cold water and lift them out, leaving the sand behind. Use the white and pale green only, or the soup takes on a dull colour.
- Sieve or blenderPressing through a sieve gives a lighter, silkier body than a blender, which can turn potato gluey if overworked. If you use a machine, pulse briefly or run it through a food mill instead.
- Finish off the boilBring the purée to a boil before the dairy goes in, then keep it below a simmer for the final five minutes. Cream added to a hard-boiling potato soup can break, and the fat will separate out on the surface.
- ConsistencyThree quarts of water to ten potatoes gives a thin soup that thickens as it stands. Judge it after sieving and hold back some of the milk if it is already the thickness you want.
- YieldRoughly three quarts finished, serving eight to ten as a first course. The croutons are served separately so they stay crisp.
Any French dish carrying the name Parmentier contains potato, in tribute to Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the eighteenth-century pharmacist and agronomist who campaigned to persuade the French that the potato was fit for human food rather than livestock fodder. The name is generally said to have become a kitchen shorthand in the nineteenth century, and it attached itself to a whole family of preparations: hachis Parmentier, potatoes Parmentier, and this purée. Its appearance in an American book of this vintage reflects how thoroughly the classical French repertoire had been absorbed into hotel and restaurant cooking in the United States, where a chef was expected to know the coded names as a matter of course. The salt pork, though, is a domestic touch: the pork here does the double work of fat and seasoning in a household that would have had a piece of it on hand anyway.