Home › The World's Kitchen › Soup Au Lard, Menagere
Soup Au Lard, Menagere
Cut three ounces bacon in quarter-inch squares, plunge them in a pint boiling water for ten minutes, remove and drain on a sieve. Boil three and a half quarts water in a large saucepan, add one pound salt pork, half a head clean cabbage cut in small pieces, two each peeled, sliced carrots and turnips, the whites of two each sliced leeks and white onions; season with one teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Cover the pan and let slowly boil for one hour, then add the pieces of bacon, one crushed bean sound garlic and three peeled, well-washed, sliced potatoes. Boil again for another hour, remove, take off the piece of pork and keep for further use. Pour the soup in a large, hot soup tureen and serve with six slices French bread, toasted, separately.
A plain boiled-pork-and-vegetable soup of the kind French household cooks made from one piece of salt meat that then went on to serve as a second course. Almost everything that needs adjusting concerns salt and timing.
- Salt first, season lastA pound of salt pork will push most of its salt into three and a half quarts of water over two hours. Soak the pork an hour or more in cold water, hold back the teaspoon of salt, and season only after the pork comes out and you have tasted the broth.
- Blanching the bacon is not optionalThe ten minutes in boiling water draws out salt and some of the smoke, which would otherwise dominate a soup this mild. Cured bacon of the period was often saltier and more heavily smoked than a modern supermarket slab; with modern bacon a shorter blanch will generally do.
- "One crushed bean sound garlic"A "bean" of garlic means roughly a clove, or a bean-sized piece of one; sound means unblemished, with no soft or sprouting centre. That much garlic in three and a half quarts is a background note, not a flavour.
- Two hours is for the pork, not the vegetablesCabbage, carrot, turnip and leek boiled a full hour collapse into threads, and the potatoes added for the second hour will be flour by the end. If you want distinct vegetables, simmer the pork alone for the first hour and add the vegetables in the last thirty to forty minutes, potatoes with twenty-five minutes to go.
- Slow boil means simmerKeep the surface barely moving. A hard boil shreds the pork and clouds the broth; covering the pan, as the original directs, helps hold the heat steady.
- Whites onlyTwo leeks and two white onions, white parts only, sliced. Save the leek greens for stock rather than the soup, where they turn grey and stringy.
- The reserved pork"Keep for further use" means the boiled pork was kept back rather than returned to the tureen, to be served separately or used in a later dish.
- Yield and the breadThe six slices of bread suggest about six servings. The toasted French bread is served separately rather than in the tureen.
Menagere is French kitchen shorthand for "housewife's" or "household" style, and it signals a dish built for economy rather than effect: one cut of cured meat, root vegetables, a cabbage, and enough water to make a meal stretch. Au lard points to the same thing, lard in French meaning bacon or cured fatback rather than rendered fat. Soups of this shape are kin to the French country pot-au-feu and garbure preparations, in which the broth is the first course and the boiled meat the second, so nothing is served twice in the same form.