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December 19
Menu: Soup Bonne Femme; Broiled Lamb Steak with Virginia Ham; Stuffed Egg Plant; Frontenac Salad Apple Tart; Coffee Soup Bonne Femme-Wash, dry, and cut up 2 large heads of lettuce, 1 pound sorrel, and 1 pound spinach. Add 3 pints white stock, and simmer, with 1½ cup Crisco, 2 carrots, and 2 onions, for 1 hour. Blend together 2 tablespoons Crisco, 4 tablespoons flour, and yolks of 2 eggs, thin with 1 cup of boiling milk, and add to broth. Season with salt and pepper, press through sieve, and serve with croutons.
A French potage of braised greens thickened with a flour-and-yolk liaison, written to showcase Crisco in every step. The fat quantities are promotional rather than culinary, and the finish needs a light hand.
- The 1½ cups of CriscoThat is three sticks' worth of fat for a soup built on three pints of stock, and it reads as promotion rather than cookery. Two to three tablespoons is enough to sweat the carrots and onions; the soup will taste cleaner for it.
- Crisco itselfAt the time of writing this meant recently introduced hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a firm white solid sold as a butter and lard substitute. Modern shortening has been reformulated to reduce trans fats; butter or a neutral oil is a better choice here in any case.
- White stockA period term for a pale unroasted stock, usually veal or veal-and-chicken, simmered without browning. Use a light chicken stock; a browned beef stock will muddy both the colour and the flavour.
- The liaison is the hingeOnce the flour-fat-yolk mixture and hot milk go in, keep the soup below a simmer. Boiling will scramble the yolks and leave a grainy soup that no sieving will rescue.
- Temper the eggsAdd the boiling milk to the yolk-and-flour blend in a thin stream while whisking, then return that mixture to the pot off the heat. Pouring cold yolks straight into hot broth curdles them.
- SorrelRarely stocked in supermarkets; look for it at farmers' markets in spring, or substitute spinach plus a squeeze of lemon at the end to restore the sharpness sorrel provides.
- An hour is long for greensLettuce and spinach are spent in fifteen minutes and turn olive-drab beyond that. The hour is really for the carrots and onions, so cut those small and cook them first, adding the greens near the end.
- Press through a sieveA blender or immersion blender does this in seconds. Pass the puree through a fine sieve afterwards if you want the smooth texture the original implies.
- YieldRoughly six to seven cups, serving four to six as a first course. The original seasons before sieving; taste again afterwards, when the stock has concentrated.
Soupe bonne femme — "good wife's" or "good woman's" soup — is most often a plain potato and leek potage, but the name attached loosely in period cookery to any homely simmered soup finished with a liaison, and the lettuce-sorrel-spinach version here belongs to the family French cooks also called potage santé, the "health soup" of green leaves and stock. Its appearance in the Crisco literature is telling: Procter & Gamble's shortening reached the market in 1911, and Marion Harris Neil, credited with the cookery, wrapped the new product in a full year's worth of menus so that a housekeeper could cook from January to December without ever reaching for butter or lard. That framing explains the improbable cup and a half of shortening in a vegetable soup — the recipes were written to demonstrate that Crisco could stand in for every fat in the kitchen, in quantities no French cook would have used.