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Potato Soup (Normandy Parboil slice)
(Normandy.) Parboil, slice, and pare ten large potatoes. Drain them and add 2 onions, sliced, 2 bits of celery, and 1 ounce butter. Cook for 10 minutes, add 4 slices of stale bread, and 1 quart of white stock. Simmer for 2 hours, add salt, pepper, and nutmeg, 1 pint of hot milk blended with flour and butter. Press through a sieve and serve with croutons.
A thick, sieved potato soup of the old French style, thickened three ways at once — potato, bread and a butter-flour liaison. The instructions are compressed to the point of contradiction in places, and the timings belong to a coal range.
- The order of operationsAs printed it reads "parboil, slice, and pare," which probably reflects boiling the potatoes in their skins so the peel slips off, though slicing before paring makes little practical sense. Easiest reading: parboil about 10 minutes, drain, peel while just cool enough to handle, then slice.
- Do not use a blenderThis is the hinge. Potato starch turns to glue under high-speed blades. Pass the soup through a food mill or push it through a sieve with a ladle, exactly as the original says.
- QuantitiesTen large potatoes is roughly 4 to 5 lb — a great deal for 1 quart of stock and 1 pint of milk. Expect something closer to a purée than a soup, and hold back extra hot stock to loosen it.
- White stockIn period usage this means an unbrowned veal or chicken stock, made from bones and vegetables without roasting. Unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute; salt only at the end, as directed, since the reduction concentrates it.
- The two-hour simmerFar longer than needed. Potatoes, onion and celery in that little liquid will be soft in 30 to 40 minutes, and two hours risks scorching on a modern burner. Simmer until everything crushes against the pan side, then sieve.
- Blended with flour and butterA beurre manié: work equal weights of soft butter and flour to a paste — about 1 oz of each — and whisk it into the hot milk, or drop it into the soup and stir until it thickens. Give it a few minutes' cooking so the flour loses its raw taste.
- Stale breadFour slices of a dense, close-crumbed loaf. It largely breaks down in the sieving and is there as a thickener, not a garnish; modern soft sandwich bread contributes less body.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use it sparingly — an eighth of a teaspoon for the whole pot. Nutmeg with potato and milk is a standing French pairing, but pre-ground jars run flat and bitter.
- YieldAround 3 quarts, serving six to eight or more as a first course. Croutons fried in butter, added at the table so they stay crisp.
"With a Saucepan Over the Sea" belongs to a turn-of-the-century genre of American cookbooks that gathered dishes from abroad and labelled them by region — here, Normandy, a province whose kitchen is defined by butter, cream and apples rather than the olive oil of the south. A potato soup finished with milk, butter and a flour liaison is very much the Norman idiom. The use of stale bread as a thickener is older still: before roux and cream became the standard binders of French cookery, bread was the ordinary way to give a soup body, and the word soupe originally meant the slice of bread over which broth was poured. The recipe's two-hour simmer is a reminder of the equipment assumed — a pot pushed to the cool back of a range and left alone, rather than watched over a gas flame.