Home › The World's Kitchen › Soupe, Originale
Soupe, Originale
Heat one tablespoon melted butter in a saucepan, add four finely sliced leeks and gently brown six minutes; moisten with two quarts broth. Season with teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, boil ten minutes, then add two ounces raw rice and gently boil thirty minutes. Skin and remove seeds from a pound of fresh pumpkin, then cut it in quarter-inch-square pieces, plunge in boiling water ten minutes, drain pumpkin pieces in a sieve, add to the soup, and gently boil fifteen minutes more. Make a smooth hash with half bean garlic, two branches well-washed parsley, one branch chervil and twelve braches chives, add it to the soup with half pint milk, gently mix, simmer fifteen minutes more, pour the soup into a tureen and serve.
A French kitchen-garden soup written in the clipped shorthand of a professional cook. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the terms are literal translations from French and the timings assume a soup meant to be soft rather than distinct.
- "Half bean garlic"A translation of demi-gousse d'ail — half a clove, not half a head. One small clove is a fair reading if your garlic is modern and mild.
- "Branches" of herbsA branch is a sprig or stem. Two sprigs parsley, one of chervil and twelve chives is roughly two tablespoons of chopped herbs in total. Chervil is worth seeking out for its faint anise note; a little tarragon plus extra parsley is the usual stand-in.
- "Smooth hash"Hachis — the garlic and herbs chopped very fine together on a board, almost to a paste. A food processor turns them watery; a knife is better.
- The riceTwo ounces is about a third of a cup of raw long-grain rice. Between the thirty minutes and the two later simmers it cooks for a full hour, so it will largely break down; that reads as thickening rather than garnish, though the recipe does not say so.
- PumpkinA pound of a dense culinary squash — kabocha, red kuri, or any firm winter squash — will hold up better than a watery, stringy field pumpkin. The ten-minute blanching leaches some flavour into the discarded water; the recipe does not say why it is called for.
- Broth and saltTwo quarts of a light chicken or vegetable broth. A teaspoon of salt suits unsalted homemade stock; with commercial broth, hold the salt until the end.
- The milkHalf a pint (one cup) goes in near the finish. Keep the pot at a bare simmer after it is added — a hard boil will curdle it, especially if the broth is acidic.
- YieldSomething over two quarts once the long boiling has reduced it, serving six to eight as a first course.
Filippini's International Cook Book gathers a great many soups under French names, and this one is essentially a potage built from garden vegetables: leeks softened in butter, a handful of rice to bind, a squash to bulk it out, and a fine-chopped hachis of garlic and green herbs stirred in near the end so the perfume survives. The title is odd — "soupe originale" seems to mean simply the original or basic soup rather than anything novel. Alexander Filippini spent years at Delmonico's in New York, and books like this were his attempt to set down, in workmanlike English, the everyday repertoire alongside the famous dining rooms' material.