Crecy Soup
(Flanders.) The Prince of Wales always eats a bowl of this every 26th of August, in memory of his ancestor, the Black Prince, and the battle of Crecy. Wash, scrape, and slice 12 fine young carrots; cook in 1 ounce of butter with 1 spoonful of chopped ham or bacon, 1 onion, 1 turnip, a bayleaf, parsley, and sweet marjoram. Stir while cooking, add 1 quart of stock, simmer two hours. Press through a sieve, add salt, pepper, and nutmeg and croutons.
A plain carrot purée built on a sweated aromatic base. The only real decisions are how much liquid to use and how long to cook it.
- Sweat, do not brownThe carrots, onion, turnip and ham go into the butter over low heat with the pan mostly covered, and the instruction to stir while cooking is the point of the dish. Fifteen minutes of gentle sweating draws out the sugar in the carrots; colouring them turns the soup harsh and muddy.
- "1 spoonful" of hamAmbiguous in the original, and it does not matter much — a tablespoon of finely chopped ham, bacon or prosciutto end is enough to season a quart. It is a background note, not a meat component.
- Quantity of carrots"Fine young carrots" implies small ones, and older varieties sold young would have been slimmer than today's supermarket carrots; about 1 to 1.25 lb trimmed weight is a sensible target for a quart of stock.
- The two-hour simmerFar longer than needed. Sliced carrots in stock are fully soft in 30 to 40 minutes, and prolonged boiling flattens their flavour and dulls the colour. Simmer until a slice crushes against the side of the pan, then stop.
- SievingA blender or stick blender does the work in a minute, but pass the purée through a fine sieve afterwards as directed — carrot fibre stays stringy no matter how long you blend, and the sieve is what makes this a soup rather than a mash.
- ConsistencyA quart of stock against a pound of carrots gives a thick purée. Hold back some of the stock, or keep extra hot stock to hand, and thin at the end to the texture you want.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and add it off the heat, at the same time as the salt and pepper. Pre-ground nutmeg that has sat in a jar contributes dust rather than aroma.
- YieldA quart of stock plus the vegetables makes roughly four modest bowls as a first course. Fry the croûtons in butter and add them at the table so they stay crisp.
Crécy is one of the fixed terms of French kitchen classification: à la Crécy means garnished with or built on carrots, and it appears in nineteenth-century menus for soups, purées and garnishes alike. The name is generally traced to carrot-growing districts in France — Crécy-en-Ponthieu in Picardy and Crécy-la-Chapelle in Brie both claim it, and the culinary literature has never settled the question. The battle story attached here belongs to the tourist-and-anecdote tradition rather than to the record: Crécy-en-Ponthieu was the site of the English victory of 1346, at which Edward the Black Prince fought, and the coincidence of names was too good for Victorian writers to leave alone.