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Vegetable Soup, Hanovrienne
Cut in very thin slices of about half an inch, half a well-washed, small green cabbage, one white turnip, one beet root, two branches crisp celery, one white onion and two leeks. Place all these vegetables in a soup pot with one ounce butter and two light teaspoons salt, cover the pan and let steam on the range for twenty minutes. Moisten with three and a half quarts water, add half-pound piece salt pork and one pound shin of beef. Season with a half teaspoon pepper, re-cover pot and let slowly boil for one and a half hours. Finely slice two peeled, small raw potatoes and two country sausages, add them to the pot and boil continually for forty minutes longer. Remove the pork and beef, skim fat from surface of soup, add half ounce butter with a teaspoon chopped chervil, pour soup into a tureen and serve with six slices of toasted (French bread).
A one-pot vegetable and meat soup in the French-menu style, straightforward to follow once a few period conventions are read correctly. The whole character of it comes from the first step, so do not rush it.
- Sweat the vegetables firstThe twenty minutes covered with butter and salt before any water goes in is the hinge of the dish. It draws out sweetness from the cabbage, leek and onion; skip it and you get boiled vegetables in water rather than soup.
- "Slices of about half an inch"The measurement is ambiguous; since the instruction opens with "very thin," the half inch most likely refers to the length or width of the cut rather than the thickness. Shred everything finely and roughly the same size so it cooks evenly.
- "Let slowly boil"Means a bare simmer, with the surface barely moving. A true rolling boil will emulsify the pork fat into the broth and cloud it, and will make the shin stringy rather than tender.
- Salt pork and saltTwo teaspoons of salt go in at the start, before a half-pound of salt pork joins the pot. Modern salt pork is often very heavily cured; taste before the final seasoning, and consider blanching the pork for five minutes and discarding that water if it is particularly salty.
- Shin of beefSold today as beef shank, usually cross-cut with the marrow bone. It is the right choice here — the collagen gives the broth body over the hour and a half. A boneless chuck piece works but will not give the same texture.
- Country sausagesFresh, uncooked pork sausages, coarsely ground and simply seasoned; period recipes of this kind commonly used salt, pepper and sometimes sage. Any fresh breakfast-style sausage will do; avoid smoked or cured links, which will overwhelm the broth.
- The beetOne beet in three and a half quarts is likely to tint the soup rather than turn it red. If you want to keep the vegetables distinct in colour, cook the beet separately and add it at the end.
- Potatoes for forty minutesFinely sliced potato boiled that long will largely break down and lightly thicken the soup. If you want the slices intact, cut them thicker or add them for the last twenty minutes.
- ChervilDelicate, faintly anise-scented, and it must go in off the heat with the finishing butter or the flavour vanishes. Flat-leaf parsley with a few tarragon leaves is the nearest common substitute.
- The meats and the yieldThe recipe removes the pork and beef and says nothing more about them; slice them and serve alongside, or return them to the tureen in pieces. The six slices of toast suggest it was meant to serve about six.
Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century restaurant menus were written in French regardless of what nation a dish came from, and a garnish name such as hanovrienne — "in the Hanover style" — was shorthand for a set of expectations rather than a strict formula. What those expectations were in any given kitchen is hard to pin down; here the dish is built on cabbage, root vegetables, leeks, salt pork and fresh sausage, all in one pot, and it is tempting to hear an echo of the German Eintopf, the household one-pot meal in which the meat, the vegetables and the broth come to the table together — though here it is dressed up slightly with a butter-and-chervil finish and toasted French bread. Whatever its ancestry, the dish shows the marks of French restaurant technique, which is why a hearty German-sounding soup arrives with a French name and a French herb.