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Soup Bonne Femme
(Provincial France.) This is the broth of the farmer and peasant's wife, wholesome and nourishing. Wash, dry, and cut up 2 large lettuces, 1 pound of sorrel, and 1 pound of spinach. Add 1 1/2 quarts of good white stock and simmer, with 1/4 pound of butter, 2 onions, and 2 carrots, for 1 hour. Add a blending of 1 ounce of butter, 1 ounce of flour, the yolks of 2 eggs, and a cup of boiling milk, salt, and pepper. Press through a sieve, and serve with croutons. PECTORAL BROTH. (A French convent soup, given to delicate nuns.) Cut up an old fowl and put with the liver, heart, and gizzard, 2 quarts of water, with a handful of marshmallow root and 2 cups of barley, 1 carrot, 3 onions, parsley, thyme, and sweet marjoram. Simmer for 3 hours, strain the broth, pressing the barley through a sieve; add the yolk of 1 egg, salt, pepper, and a tablespoonful of rum or brandy. It should be reduced to almost a quart, and is very healing.
Two thickened green broths from the same page: a peasant lettuce-and-sorrel soup, and a convent invalid broth built on an old boiling fowl. Both finish with egg yolk, which is where they can go wrong.
- The hinge: the yolk liaisonIn both soups the egg yolk goes in off the boil. Whisk a ladle of hot broth into the beaten yolks first, return the mixture to the pan, and hold it below a simmer — around 180F. Any boiling and the yolk curdles into threads that no sieve will disguise.
- Sorrel and aluminiumSorrel and reactive pans -- A pound of sorrel is very high in oxalic acid, which will react with aluminium or bare cast iron and turn the soup grey and metallic. Use stainless steel or enamel.
- Quantities and yield1 1/2 quarts is 6 cups; with the milk the finished Bonne Femme comes to about seven cups, enough for six as a first course. The greens look absurd raw and collapse to almost nothing, so do not scale them down.
- An hour is long for greensSimmering lettuce, sorrel and spinach for a full hour was intended to make everything soft enough to press through a sieve. If you are using a blender, 20 to 25 minutes is enough and the colour stays green rather than olive.
- The butterA quarter pound of butter in the pot plus another ounce in the roux is one stick plus two tablespoons. This is what makes the soup rich rather than thin; cutting it in half works, but expect a leaner result.
- "Good white stock"An unbrowned veal or chicken stock, made from bones roasted not at all. A light chicken stock is the practical substitute; avoid a dark brown stock, which fights the greens.
- An old fowlA stewing hen — a laying bird past production, tough and full of collagen and flavour. Supermarket chicken will not survive three hours of simmering; look for a stewing hen at a butcher or halal market, or use a whole 4-5 lb bird and accept a lighter broth.
- Marshmallow rootThe dried root of Althaea officinalis, sold in herb and tea shops. It was included for its mucilage, which gives the broth a slippery, soothing body — the point of a "pectoral" (chest) broth. It is not interchangeable with the confection that took its name.
- Reduction in the convent brothTwo quarts down to "almost a quart" is a reduction by half over three hours, so simmer uncovered or partly covered. Season at the end: salt added early will double in concentration.
Bonne femme — "good wife" — is French kitchen shorthand for the plain domestic treatment: garden greens, stock, butter, no garnish beyond croutons. Sorrel is the reason this soup tastes of anything at all; lettuce and spinach alone would be bland. The second recipe belongs to a different tradition, the convent infirmary. Pectoral preparations were aimed at the chest and throat, and the marshmallow root here is a genuine demulcent, used in European herbal medicine for centuries for exactly that purpose. The spoonful of rum or brandy at the end, and the phrase "given to delicate nuns," place this squarely in the long era when soup was prescribed rather than merely served — invalid cookery filled whole chapters of nineteenth-century household manuals.