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Potato Soup (Geneva Parboil and pare large)
(Geneva.) Parboil and pare 6 large potatoes, fry them in 1 ounce of butter, add salt, pepper, parsley, a blade of mace, and a bayleaf, also 1/4 pound of chopped ham. Cover with 1 quart consomme, add a teaspoonful of sugar, 1 of butter, 1 of flour, and the yolks of 2 eggs. Press through a sieve.
A short, rich purée from the Geneva chapter of a travelling cook's notebook. The order of operations is compressed almost to shorthand, and the egg yolks are the part that needs thought.
- The hinge: the yolksDo not stir raw yolks into a boiling pot. Simmer the potatoes in the consommé until tender, sieve, then whisk a ladle of the hot soup into the beaten yolks and return that mixture to the pan over low heat, stirring until it thickens slightly. Above about 180F the yolks curdle and the soup goes grainy.
- Blade of maceA blade is one dried strip of the aril that sheathes a nutmeg; equivalents given for ground mace vary, somewhere in the region of a quarter to a half teaspoon. Fish it out with the bay leaf before sieving.
- ConsomméA clarified beef or veal broth. Unsalted stock works, but taste before adding the salt called for at the frying stage, since the ham contributes a good deal of its own.
- Parboil and pareBoil the potatoes about 10 minutes, until the skins slip and the centres are still firm, then peel before frying. The recipe does not say whether to cut them up. Fully cooked potatoes fall apart in the butter.
- The second butter and flourThe teaspoon each of butter and flour is a small beurre manié for body. Work them to a paste and whisk it into the simmering soup a few minutes before the yolks go in, so the flour has time to cook out.
- Pressing through a sieveA food mill or a drum sieve gives the intended texture. A blender or stick blender turns cooked potato gluey; if you use one, pulse briefly and stop.
- YieldA quart of consommé plus six potatoes gives about six modest first-course servings, or four bowls as a light supper.
The bare parenthetical "(Geneva.)" standing in for any description is characteristic of collections in which dishes are noted city by city, though nothing in the page itself confirms the circumstances of its compilation. Thickening a potato soup with egg yolks rather than cream is a French liaison technique of the period; how far it was specifically a Geneva or Swiss habit is not something this recipe can establish, and the same goes for the small quantity of chopped ham, which may simply be seasoning economy. Mace and bay in a potato soup look old-fashioned now, but mace was a common savoury spice in nineteenth-century Anglo-European kitchens. The recipe's compression hird no times, no temperatures, no order beyond the sequence of the sentence hird is typical of collections written for cooks assumed to already know what a purée of potatoes should look like.