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Cream of Lettuce
(France.) Wash and drain three large heads of lettuce, chop them, and fry them with 1/4 pound of butter. Add salt, pepper, a bunch of parsley, 5 ounces of rich, and 2 quarts of white stock. Cook for 45 minutes, press through a sieve, add 1 pint of boiling milk, and serve with croutons.
A classic French purée soup thickened with rice rather than flour. One line in the original is garbled, and the butter quantity wants attention before you start.
- "5 ounces of rich"Almost certainly a printer's error for rice — 5 oz (about 3/4 cup) of raw white rice is the standard thickener for this style of cream soup, cooked in the stock and then sieved with the lettuce. Nothing else in the ingredient list would carry the body the method implies.
- ButterA quarter pound for three heads of lettuce is generous by modern taste. Four tablespoons will sweat the lettuce perfectly well; the remainder enriches a soup whose only other dairy is a pint of milk.
- "Fry them"This means sweat, not brown. Keep the heat low and covered until the lettuce collapses — colour in the pan turns the finished soup a dull olive instead of pale green.
- White stockAn unsalted veal or chicken stock, light in colour and body. Use 2 quarts of low-sodium chicken stock and salt at the end, since 45 minutes of reduction concentrates whatever is already there.
- Pressing through a sieveA blender does this faster and better; pass the purée through a fine sieve afterwards to catch the lettuce ribs and parsley stems. The rice must be fully soft first or the texture stays grainy.
- The milkAdd it boiling, as directed, and off the heat; a cold pour drops the temperature, and a hard boil after the milk goes in risks curdling it.
- Lettuce choiceRomaine or a firm butterhead. Loose-leaf and iceberg give too little flavour for the volume of stock here.
- YieldRoughly 2 1/2 quarts, serving eight to ten as a first course. Croûtons should go in at the table, not in the tureen.
Cream soups built on a rice liaison rather than a flour roux were a mainstay of nineteenth-century French professional cookery, where the vegetable, the stock and the rice were cooked together and forced through a tamis — the sieve step this recipe still assumes. Lettuce may have reached the soup pot partly as thrift, since kitchens buying lettuce for salads had outer leaves and bolted heads to use, and the mild flavour takes enrichment well. The bare "(France.)" heading and the shorthand instructions leave the reader to supply the technique.