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By Root 2171 0

a provincial restaurant which has been famous for thirty years for its half-dozen rather grand specialities. These were, and are, beautiful dishes cooked and served to perfection, but the vegetable soups, made for the staff as well as for the customers, had just as much finesse in a different way. Composed of cheap vegetables such as carrots, potatoes and leeks, enriched with good butter and cream and faintly flavoured with parsley or chervil, made into purées of about the consistency of thin cream (I think we often make our cream soups too thick, too porridgy, in England, although I have heard people complain that French soups are too thin), they were soups which embodied so much of the charm, the flavours and scents of a country house kitchen garden that every evening while I stayed in that little hotel it was a struggle not to accept second or even third helpings of soup and so risk having no appetite left for the dishes to follow.

This is one of the dangers of a good soup. No doubt because the tin and the package have become so universal, people are astonished by the true flavours of a well-balanced home-made soup and demand more helpings if only to make sure that their noses and palates are not deceiving them. So it is always best to announce, as soon as the soup is served, what dishes are to follow, and not to go in for any false modesty in this respect. ‘But there’s nothing, absolutely nothing else coming’ means, to the initiated, that there are going to be five courses of rather filling food. But it is kinder to guests to say so in a rather more direct manner.

The soup recipes in this book are mainly of the simple variety I have described. They are, on the whole, the kind most suitable to conditions in England. The ingredients are easily found; they are neither complicated nor costly. For those which require stock, I have described in detail how the best kind of meat broth, that from the pot-au-feu, is made. Not that one has to go through this performance every time one wants a little stock; but I do think it is essential that the principle should be understood. Once anybody has got the idea of a properly made broth into their heads, it is unlikely they will ever again resort to the hit and miss methods of the ‘bundle it all into the stock-pot’ school.

As far as the peasant and farmhouse soups, the garbures and the potées of traditional regional cookery go, I have only included one or two of these. In their way they are admirable, but heavy mixtures of pork and cabbage, beans and sausages and bread, constitute almost a whole meal in themselves, to be enjoyed by people who work hard all day in the open air; and I hope readers will excuse me for referring them to another volume, French Country Cooking,14 for recipes for this type of soup.

One more point. Although it is not necessary to know a great number of soups, it is highly desirable to have at least one well-tried recipe for every season of the year, and then one will not be led into the expense of buying out of season vegetables or into the error of unnecessary substitution. For example, the potato and tomato soup on page 167, which is one of my favourites, also demands leeks. On several occasions I have tried, when leeks were out of season, using onions instead. Those who had not already eaten it cooked with leeks were probably unaware that anything was wrong, but I was myself quite conscious of the fact that the soup was not absolutely as it should have been. So I have given up trying to make the soup in the summer when no leeks are to be had; and serve instead a cream of fresh green peas, or the delicious potage Crécy, or the very light tomato soup described on page 173. If one is going to the trouble of preparing home-made soups one might as well have each one as good as possible of its kind.

POT-AU-FEU

No mystery attaches to the making of a pot-au-feu so long as it is understood that it is two dishes, first a beef broth which may be thickened with rice or pasta or served as a clear consommé and, secondly, the boiled beef which has itself contributed