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Puree of Broad Beans
(Brittany.) Cook 1 1/2 pints of fresh Lima beans in salted water with 1 ounce chopped ham, some parsley, a clove, and an onion. When tender, drain and add 1 ounce butter and strain the liquor and put it aside. Press the beans through a sieve, add 1 pint hot milk, salt, and pepper. It is best made with chicken or veal broth. Reduce the liquor by boiling and add to the soup. Serve with croutons.
A straightforward puréed bean soup that gives quantities by volume and assumes a drum sieve and a cook who knows when to stop reducing. Two things need translating: what the beans actually are, and how thin the finished soup should be.
- Broad beans or LimasThe title says broad beans (fava) but the text calls for Lima beans; American books of the period often reached for limas where a European original meant favas, presumably because fresh favas were harder to buy. Either works; shelled fresh favas benefit from a second peeling of the pale skin after blanching, or the puree will be grainy and grey-green rather than smooth.
- 1 1/2 pints of beansA volume measure of shelled beans, roughly 24 fl oz on the American pint, or somewhere around 1 to 1 1/4 lb shelled. Frozen baby limas or frozen peeled favas substitute directly; favas in the pod yield well under half their weight shelled, so expect to need three to four pounds of pods.
- Fish out the aromaticsThe clove, onion, parsley stems and ham are flavouring only. Remove them before the beans go through the sieve, or the clove will dominate and the ham will clog the mesh.
- The sieveA food mill with the medium plate does this work in a minute; a blender gives a smoother result but will not catch skins, so peel the beans first if you go that route. Passing the blended purée through a fine strainer afterwards is worth the extra pan.
- Reduce the liquor, then judgeThe cooking water is boiled down to concentrate it before it rejoins the soup. Add it gradually: a pint of milk plus the full reduced liquor can leave the soup thinner than intended, and it is easier to loosen a thick purée than to thicken a thin one.
- Chicken or veal brothThe line "best made with" broth is placed after the milk and is ambiguous: it may mean cooking the beans in broth instead of salted water, or thinning with broth in place of some of the milk. Either reading works. Unsalted or lightly salted stock is safer here, since the ham and the reduction both add salt.
- Don't boil after the milkBean purée sits on the bottom of the pan and scorches quickly once it is thick and milky. Warm it through over moderate heat, stirring, and hold it below a simmer.
- Yield and croutonsServes four to six as a first course. Small cubes of bread fried in butter, added at the table rather than in the tureen, so they stay crisp.
Broad beans are one of the oldest cultivated legumes in Europe and were a staple across Brittany and the rest of northern France long before the potato arrived; a thick bean pottage thinned with milk or broth is about as plain and old a country dish as the region has. What makes this a turn-of-the-century restaurant-style version rather than a peasant one is the sieve: the fashion in French cookery of the period was to pass everything through a tamis and call the result a purée, and soups named for a single vegetable pressed smooth seem to fill the soup chapters of English and American books from roughly the end of the nineteenth century onward. The substitution of Lima beans for favas is a telling one, the bean the readers of such a book could actually buy standing in for the original.