Home › Soups › Potage Jacqueline
Potage Jacqueline
(Paris.) Blend 1 cup of milk, yolks 3 eggs, and 1 ounce flour, over the fire. Add 1 1/2 quarts chicken broth, boiling hot, salt, pepper, parsley, then strain it and add one tablespoonful of boiled rice, the same of cooked green peas, carrots, and asparagus, cut up.
A thin French velouté-style soup thickened with egg yolks and garnished with a spoonful each of four cooked vegetables. The whole thing stands or falls on temperature control.
- Never let it boilOnce the yolks are in, the soup must not exceed about 180F or the eggs curdle and the liaison breaks into threads. Hold it just below a simmer, and if reheating, do it gently over low heat or in a bain-marie.
- Building the base"Blend over the fire" means cook the milk, yolks and flour together into a smooth paste before the broth goes in. Whisk the flour into the cold milk first, then the yolks, then set it over low heat — flour into hot yolk-milk will lump.
- Adding the brothThe broth goes in boiling hot, but pour it into the base in a thin stream while whisking rather than the reverse. A quart and a half of boiling liquid dumped onto three yolks at once will scramble them.
- 1 ounce flourWeight, not volume: about 28 g, or a scant ¼ cup. This is a light thickening — the soup should coat a spoon, not stand up in it.
- The garnishOne tablespoon each of rice, peas, carrot and asparagus is a small amount for this quantity of liquid; the recipe gives no serving count, but the effect is a clear-tasting soup with a scatter of garnish, not a vegetable soup. Cut the carrot and asparagus small and even, and add everything already cooked so nothing simmers long enough to force the soup up in heat.
- Strain before garnishingThe straining step comes before the vegetables go in, and it matters — it catches any flour lumps and the parsley stems, leaving a smooth base. A fine chinois or a sieve lined with cheesecloth.
- Seasoning and brothHousehold chicken broth of the period would have been homemade, and its salting varied. If using commercial stock, taste before adding any salt; a lightly thickened soup concentrates saltiness as it stands.
- YieldThe liquid comes to roughly 1 3/4 quarts before straining; the recipe gives no serving count.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea collected dishes its author gathered from kitchens abroad, and the parenthetical "(Paris.)" is doing the work of a provenance note — this is what an American reader of the period wanted from a French soup: a professional liaison technique, a French name, and vegetables cut small. Naming a potage after a woman was common enough in the French repertoire, where dishes carried the names of patrons, performers and the occasional invention of a chef flattering someone; no particular Jacqueline is documented here, and the name likely travelled with the recipe rather than pointing to a person the author knew. The method itself is older than the name: thickening broth with egg yolks beaten into milk or cream is the classical liaison, and it is generally said to have been described in French cookery before flour was routinely added alongside it; the flour here is a hedge — it stabilises the yolks and makes the soup rather harder to ruin in a domestic kitchen than the pure egg-and-cream version would be.