Home › The World's Kitchen › Soup, Suisse
Soup, Suisse
Procure a two-pound piece short ribs of beef, tie it with string and place in a saucepan with a small beef marrow bone; pour in five quarts cold water with a tablespoon salt. Set on fire and let slowly come to boiling point, skim fat from surface, then add two medium carrots, two sound white turnips, two onions and two branches celery, cover pan and let simmer on corner of range two hours. Finely slice two well-washed leeks, add them to the soup and slowly boil half hour longer; then remove the beef bone, carrots, turnips, onions and celery. Chop up together three branches fresh parsley, one branch chervil and half a sound bean garlic; add this hash to the soup with four ounces good raw rice, lightly mix and continually simmer forty minutes. Skim fat from surface of soup, transfer it to a soup tureen and serve with two ounces of grated Swiss or Parmesan cheese, separately.
A long-simmered beef broth finished with rice and a green hash, in the mold of the national soups that filled the back half of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks. Two instructions need adjusting before it works in a modern kitchen.
- The rice timing is the hingeFour ounces of raw rice simmered forty minutes in an already-reduced broth will collapse into porridge. Long-grain rice needs 18-20 minutes in soup; add it accordingly and hold the pot at a bare tremble, not a boil, so the grains stay whole.
- "Corner of range"On a coal range this meant the coolest part of the top, where a pot barely shivers. On a gas or induction burner, use the lowest setting with the lid ajar, aiming for the occasional bubble rather than a rolling boil.
- "Half a sound bean garlic"A literal rendering of the French gousse d'ail, a clove of garlic. Half a clove, chopped raw into the parsley and chervil, is the intent, and it is deliberately restrained.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh in American groceries; it is a delicate anise-scented herb that dies in heat. If you cannot find it, use a little more parsley plus a few tarragon leaves, and stir the hash in near the end rather than giving it the full simmer.
- Quantities and reductionFive quarts of water will reduce over the roughly three hours and ten minutes of simmering the recipe calls for, though by how much depends on the pot and the heat. Four ounces of rice is about two-thirds of a cup by volume. Expect eight to ten servings.
- Salting at the startA tablespoon of salt into five quarts is light seasoning at the outset, which is correct here, since the liquid will reduce as it simmers. Taste and correct only after the vegetables are removed and the rice is in.
- The beef is a second dishThe short ribs are not returned to the tureen. Nineteenth-century practice was to serve the boiled beef separately with coarse salt, mustard, pickles or a horseradish sauce; the marrow can be spooned onto toast.
- SkimmingSkim twice as directed, but the easiest route is to chill the finished broth and lift the solidified fat off before reheating with the rice. Short ribs and a marrow bone throw a great deal of fat.
- The cheesePassed at table, not stirred in. Swiss here means a firm Alpine cheese such as Gruy e or Emmental, grated fine so it melts into the hot soup rather than roping.
Books of this period usually carried a section of "foreign" or national soups, each keyed to a country by one identifying detail rather than by any strict regional authenticity, and this one earns its name from the grated Alpine cheese handed round at the end. Underneath, it is a straightforward pot-au-feu: beef and a marrow bone drawn slowly in cold water, aromatics simmered and then discarded once they have given up their flavor, the skimmed broth carrying rice and a raw green hash. The construction, down to the anglicized French of "bean garlic" for gousse d'ail, points to a professional kitchen trained in the French manner, which is where a good deal of American hotel and restaurant cooking of the 1900s is often said to have come from. Grating hard cheese over broth at the table is a habit shared across the Alps and northern Italy, and here it is the cheese, more than any technique, that marks the soup as Swiss.