Soup Verte
4 tablespoonfuls flour 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 bunch parsley 1 teaspoonful sugar 2 egg yolks 1 lemon Salt and pepper to taste Put stock into saucepan; add spinach and parsley, picked and thoroughly washed; let all boil twenty minutes; strain, rubbing puree through sieve. Return it all to saucepan, add Crisco and flour mixed together with cupful of water, sugar and strained juice of a quarter of lemon. Let boil five minutes. Beat yolks of eggs with 1/4 cupful water, add them gradually to soup off fire, and stir near fire until cooked. Soup must not boil after yolks are added. Season with salt and pepper and serve.
A green puree soup thickened twice, once with a fat-and-flour slurry and again with egg yolks. The ingredient list as printed has lost several lines, so the quantities of stock, spinach, Crisco and flour have to be supplied by the cook.
- The missing amountsThe printed list gives only parsley, sugar, egg yolks, lemon and seasoning; the method calls for stock, spinach, Crisco and flour that never appear above it. Reasonable working quantities for a soup of this scale are about 1 1/2 quarts stock, 1 lb spinach, 2 tablespoons fat and 2 tablespoons flour, but the original figures are genuinely lost rather than deducible.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, originally made from cottonseed oil and reformulated over the years though still sold under the same name. Butter can be substituted in the flour-and-fat mixture here; the book's purpose was to show that the new shortening could stand in for butter and lard.
- The hinge: never let it boil after the yolksYolk alone starts to thicken around 150F and sets by roughly 160F; diluted in liquid, as here, it curdles nearer 180F. Once the yolks are in, the soup must be held below a simmer or they will set into threads and the smooth body is gone. Slackening them with the 1/4 cupful of water first, then adding them off the heat, is what makes this work.
- Twenty minutes of boiling greensModern practice would blanch spinach and parsley three or four minutes and puree at once. Twenty minutes turns the green olive-brown; a shorter boil keeps the colour that gives the soup its name.
- Straining"Rubbing puree through sieve" is a blender or immersion blender followed, if you want it fine, by a pass through a chinois. Parsley stems in particular leave fibres a blender will not break down.
- The lemon and sugarA quarter lemon's juice and a teaspoon of sugar are there to lift a flat vegetable stock, not to make the soup sweet or sour. Add both at the end and taste before committing.
- Yield and servingAt the quantities suggested above, six small first-course servings. Serve hot in warmed cups; it will not reheat well once the yolks are in.
Soup verte is simply green soup, the French kitchen's name for any puree built on spinach with sorrel, parsley or chervil, finished here with egg yolk and sharpened with lemon. Its presence in The Story of Crisco is commercial rather than culinary: Procter & Gamble published the book in 1913 to introduce hydrogenated cottonseed shortening to American cooks, and the recipes were chosen to prove the product could do everything butter and lard did, including the modest roux at the base of a delicate soup. The kosher and dietary appeal was part of the pitch too, since a vegetable fat sidestepped both butter and lard.