Heat the milk and cream to a boil and simmer a couple of minutes over very low heat. Add the chopped clams, let the milk return to a boil, and pour it over the potatoes in the soup pot. Taste the chowder for seasoning and add a few grindings of pepper (it probably won’t need salt). Serve at once, garnished with minced parsley and the reserved salt-pork bits.
CREAM OF TOMATO SOUP
Real cream of tomato soup isn’t worth making with anything but dead-ripe, sweet, juicy local tomatoes in season. Even good canned tomatoes will lack the right summery sprightliness. If a batch of tomatoes is a little wan-flavored, I sometimes resort to a small dollop or two of homemade tomato paste or a combination of regular and sun-dried tomato paste.
Cream may curdle, though not as badly as milk, when heated with an acid solution such as tomato broth unless the mixture is stabilized with some kind of starch. A small amount of beurre manié does the trick here.
YIELD: About 7 cups
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
6 to 7 shallots, coarsely chopped
7 to 8 very ripe, juicy medium-sized tomatoes (about 3⅔ pounds), well rinsed
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup (or to taste) well-flavored chicken, beef, veal, or vegetable stock
2 to 3 teaspoons beurre manié (this page)
1 teaspoon salt, or to taste
1 to 1½ tablespoons tomato paste (optional, see above)
A pinch of sugar (optional)
Minced scallions, chives, or parsley for garnish
Melt the butter in a medium-sized saucepan over medium heat; when it foams and sizzles, add the shallots and sauté until translucent and tender. Cut the tomatoes into wedges, add to the pan, and simmer, covered, until they are swimming in their own juice, 20 to 25 minutes.
While the tomatoes are cooking, bring the cream to a boil in a small saucepan and let it reduce over low heat to about ½ cup. Heat the stock in another saucepan.
Pour the cooked tomatoes, with their juice, into a heatproof bowl, then work them through a food mill into the pot they cooked in. Discard the skins and seeds. Heat the purée just to a boil and add the hot stock. Whisk the beurre manié into the reduced cream, then whisk into the soup along with the salt; cook just until slightly thickened. Taste for seasoning. If you think it needs a little enrichment or some softening of the acid, add a dollop of tomato paste or, as a last resort, a pinch of sugar. Serve hot, garnishing each serving with a little minced scallion, chives, or parsley.
APPLE-ONION CREAM SOUP
Cream soups are best when they have something more than creaminess going for them. A good cold-weather example is this robust sweet-tart combination of apples—use a good local fall variety in season—and onions with some crisp bacon for counterpoint. It’s best when made with a strong, full-flavored beef broth.
YIELD: 8 to 9 cups
4 to 6 thick slices of bacon, coarsely diced
3 to 4 tart, juicy apples, pared, quartered, cored, and coarsely diced
4 tablespoons butter
4 large onions, coarsely diced
3 cups good beef broth, or as needed
6 to 8 whole allspice berries, lightly bruised
1 cup heavy cream
1 teaspoon salt, or to taste
Freshly ground black pepper
A dash of lemon juice (optional)
1 teaspoon caraway seeds, lightly bruised (optional)
Cook the bacon slowly in a heavy skillet to render out all the fat. When it is crisp, scoop it out of the fat and drain on paper towels. Sauté the diced apples over medium heat in the same skillet, stirring occasionally, until cooked through. Scoop out a few spoonfuls of the apples for garnish and set aside.
Melt the butter in a large heavy saucepan. When it foams and sizzles, add the chopped onions and sauté very patiently over low heat, stirring frequently, for 15 to 20 minutes, until the onions are well softened and starting to brown. Scoop out a few spoonfuls for garnish and set aside with the reserved apples. Add the rest of the apples to the onions, pour in the broth, add the allspice, and simmer until everything is nearly dissolved, 10 to 15 minutes.
Fish out and discard the allspice. Purée the soup in batches in a blender or food processor, making sure to leave the texture slightly coarse. Return the soup to the pot, heat to a boil, and stir in the cream. Let it come to a boil again, add the salt and a grinding of pepper, and taste for seasoning; if it seems too bland, squeeze in a little lemon juice. If it is too thick for your taste, thin it with some hot water. Serve garnished with the reserved bacon, apple, and onion. I like a scattering of caraway seed as well.
VICHYSSOISE
Chilled cream soups do not go back very far in the annals of either French or American gastronomy. Before modern refrigeration, the whole business of chilling food at any season but winter was expensive, difficult, and almost wholly reserved for fancy aspics and ice creams. Crème vichyssoise glacée, the best-known chilled cream soup of the twentieth century, saw the light of day in or around 1917 as a summer cooler, the international hybrid offspring of a simple French leek-and-potato soup and a developing American enthusiasm for new dishes based on refrigeration technology. The soup’s inventor was Louis Diat, chef at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York, who designed his brainchild for the summer menu of the hotel’s rooftop-garden restaurant and named it for the city of Vichy, close to his Bourbonnais home.
The idea struck a chord with American cooks and diners. Recipes for Diat-inspired vichyssoise had been published even before he officially set down his version in the 1941 Cooking à la Ritz. The new soup became the prototype of innumerable chilled puréed concoctions that people kept “discovering” over at least the next thirty years; Gourmet magazine’s mailbox was regularly filled with readers’ offers to share family improvisations on the theme (puréed cooked something, mixed with a lot of cream and served ice cold) using any vegetable from asparagus to zucchini. Electric blenders made it possible to invent more elaborate mixtures—there is no telling how many people independently stumbled on “Fishyssoise”—at the push of a button.
But strange to say, or perhaps not so strange, the taste for these voluptuous imaginings never spread far beyond the United States. Vichyssoise and the rest remained far outside mainstream French preferences. The cautious embrace of vichyssoise in Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking seems to depend on toning down the general milk-and-cream content of the original—and no one could possibly question David’s credentials as a cream lover. It strikes me as significant that chilled soups freighted with heavy cream became synonymous with American gourmet cooking at just the time that honest-tasting unhomogenized whole milk with its intrinsically creamy quality was disappearing from the American table. Part of what filled the vacuum was cream, with sometimes good but often regrettable results.
By my lights, the fall from grace that cold cream soups underwent a few decades back was not wholly unmerited. But vichyssoise as made by Diat was certainly the best of them, a genuinely pleasant soup that doesn’t deserve the “updates” or “makeovers” or “tweakings” commonly visited on it in recent years. A few points have to be kept in mind if it is to taste like anything:
1. Being thick and heavy by nature, it doesn’t need to be drowned in superrich cream. Diat calls for much more stock or water, milk (meaning unhomogenized whole milk), and “medium cream” (I use light cream or rich half-and-half) than heavy cream.
2. The potatoes should have plenty of mealiness and flavor.
3. Because it is served very cold, it needs a lot of salt.
I don’t see how Diat’s straightforward cold soup can be improved on, unless by a dash of acid such as lemon juice or good wine vinegar. My puréeing device of choice is a hand-turned food mill, though the original uses just a strainer. This amount, which according to Diat ought to serve eight, seems more suitable for ten or twelve, since it makes about 3 quarts. The recipe can easily be halved.
4 leeks, white part only, sliced thin
1
medium onion, sliced thin
2 ounces unsalted butter
5 medium potatoes, peeled and sliced thin
1 quart water or chicken broth
1 tablespoon salt
2 cups milk
2 cups light cream or half-and-half
1 cup heavy cream
Melt the butter in a medium saucepan, add the leeks and onion, and sauté gently until scarcely browned. Add the potatoes, water or stock, and salt, and cook over medium-low heat until the potatoes are tender, about 35 to 40 minutes. Put the mixture through a food mill set over a bowl. Return to the pan and stir in the milk and light cream. Season to taste and bring to a boil before letting cool to room temperature. Stir in the heavy cream and chill thoroughly. Serve very cold, garnished if you like with minced chives.
MILK TOAST
This dish is one of our last remaining links with “soup” in its oldest sense. The word originally meant bread, often toasted stale pieces or the hard crust of a loaf, put to frugal use by being soaked (“sopped”) in something wet—water, broth, ale, wine, or milk. The last of these was certainly the most nutritious alternative in many parts of Europe where during bad times some people were lucky to see meat a few times a year. Somehow the “soup” idea was first transferred to the soaking liquid and then reattached to a whole class of liquid dishes minus the sopped bread. Today there are only a few soups that we routinely associate with bread crusts or croutons. And few people would be likely to think of the spoonable breakfast or supper dish called “milk toast”—once routinely fed to nursery-age children and invalids—as having the slightest connection with soup.
Even divorced from its old associations with thrifty medieval foodways, milk toast has its charms. It can be a lesson in the happy affinity of bread and milk; read the milk-toast entry (in which two people revel in a no-pains-spared version at a supremely elegant restaurant) in M. F. K. Fisher’s An Alphabet for Gourmets. Of course, it can also be dreary beyond belief. The difference is all in the caliber of the two star players. The bread must be firm and nicely toasted, the milk fresh and creamy. Detail-minded cooks used to specify “rich milk.” I can’t see making it without unhomogenized whole milk from a good small dairy; if that’s out of the question, mix homogenized whole milk with a dash of cream or a few dashes of half-and-half. (You can indeed splurge by using nothing but cream, for what used to be called “cream toast.”)
Here is the general idea: You will first need some fresh hot toast, from slightly stale bread. (Give coarse, hearty bread a day or two to acquire the right texture; let fine-textured, dainty bread stand overnight.) Allow about as much toast per serving as one greedy person might eat for breakfast. I prefer it sliced rather thick and toasted to a good rich brown on both sides. Butter the hot toast on both sides—this keeps it from getting too soggy too fast—and put it in individual serving bowls, preferably rather deep ones. Some people tear or cut the toast into bite-sized pieces.
Meanwhile, have some “rich milk” slowly warming in a small saucepan, preferably with a large pinch of salt and a grinding of pepper to each cup. There is a slurpy-is-better school that uses a generous cupful to two substantial slices of toast, and another wing that likes about half that amount, or just enough to be almost absorbed by the toast. When the milk is too hot to stick a finger into, pour it over the toast in the bowls. Serve at once, while the toast has a little bite to it.
VARIATION: Serious milk-toast lovers should investigate a splendidly bold-tasting Balkan counterpart usually called popara, enriched with feta cheese. My version is slightly modified from the directions in Maria Kaneva-Johnson’s The Melting Pot: Balkan Food and Cookery. Crumble an ounce or two of feta cheese into a bowl, cover it with creamy whole milk, and let soak for 30 minutes to an hour. Drain off the milk into a saucepan. Meanwhile, take some robust, slightly stale country-style bread, broken into bite-sized pieces, and divide it among four ovenproof serving bowls. Dot the surface with bits of butter and heat the bread in a preheated moderate (300°F) oven for about 20 minutes. Briefly scald the milk, with or without a little sugar. (The proportions, by the way, should be such that the milk will be almost completely absorbed by the bread.) Scatter the drained cheese over the bread in each bowl and pour the hot milk over it. If desired, sprinkle a dash of Hungarian or Turkish paprika over each serving.
“WHITE SAUCE” OR SAUCE BÉCHAMEL MAIGRE
Milk sauces thickened with flour did not become common in European cooking until the eighteenth century. After that, however, they took a sharp upturn paralleling the rise of modern dairying and modern flour milling. By the turn of the twentieth century, milk sauces overshadowed other kinds in most middle-class American and English kitchens. When up-to-date cooks of Fannie Farmer’s era thought of “sauce,” milk-based white sauce was what they most often had in mind.
Standard white sauces of a century ago usually involved either a briefly cooked mix of flour and butter with milk added, or a slurry of flour (or starch) and cold milk that thickened in cooking. With small variations like the addition of tomato or egg yolk, they could be rechristened by many other names. Similar mixtures were the base of cream soups. When made very thick, they were the starting point for croquettes.
After the 1970s, white sauces as a class were largely relegated to the culinary Hall of Shame, an understandable fate in view of what most of them had come to taste like by midcentury. But we should not forget that butter was generally more buttery and milk creamier during the first heyday of white sauces in American kitchens. In other words, they weren’t necessarily as insipid as they would become. And the founding white sauce that gave birth to them wasn’t insipid at all. It was the French béchamel, a sauce that demanded scrupulous, thoughtful attention and judgment. A true béchamel must be cooked a long time with extreme delicacy so that it stays white instead of browning; at the same time, it develops real flavor of its own.
The béchamel version that became classic, after being championed by Carême in the early nineteenth century, used a rich mixture of cream and an elaborate, painstakingly reduced meat stock as the liquid. A little later, milk came in as a substitute in the version called sauce béchamel maigre. Maigre, meaning “lean,” designates dishes that are meatless or otherwise suitable for Fridays, fast days, and Lent, when nothing on the table is supposed to be grasse—non-“lean,” or meat-based. (The word means literally “fat,” or “fatty.”) The family of modern American white sauces originated as shortcut versions of béchamel maigre.
Béchamel grasse has nearly vanished today, even in France, but I would recommend the following version of béchamel maigre to anyone willing to put a little more time and effort than usual into white sauce. Admirers of Madame E. Saint-Ange’s noble twentieth-century cooking manual will recognize that my version is adapted from hers.
(A parenthetical note: To reconstruct a decent if not super-ambitious béchamel grasse, replace the milk with any preferred combination of stock and cream—nonultrapasteurized, it should go without saying. To get closest to the spirit of the original, use a rich veal stock.)
YIELD: About 2 cups
The few simple enrichments and aromatics given here make all the difference between a subtly flavored sauce and what critics not unjustly call “library paste.”
1 small onion or half onion
1 small carrot or half carrot
A bit of celery stalk
A few parsley stems
A few mushroom trimmings
¼ cup unsalted butter
A few scraps of dry-cured country ham or prosciutto (optional)
3 generous cups whole milk (preferably unhomogenized)
¼ cup flour
1 bay leaf
1 to 2 sprigs of fresh thyme, or a large pinch of dried thyme
Salt and freshly ground white or black pepper to taste
Freshly grated nutmeg
Chop the onion, carrot, and celery into medium-fine dice. Coarsely cut up the parsley stems and mushroom trimmings.
Melt half the butter in a small heavy saucepan over low heat. Add the onion, carrot, celery, parsley, and mushroom and optional ham scraps. Cook, stirring, for 8 to 10 minutes, being careful not to let the vegetables brown. Scrape out the sautéed aromatics into a bowl and melt the rest of the butter in the same pan over very gentle heat. Meanwhile, heat the milk just to boiling in another small, heavy saucepan.
Add the flour to the butter and cook over low heat, stirring gently, until the mixture is smooth. It must not brown. Whisk in the hot milk. Return the sautéed aromatics to the pan and add the bay leaf, thyme, salt, pepper, and a discreet grating of nutmeg. Bring the sauce to a boil. Simmer, uncovered, over low heat for 30 to 40 minutes, stirring occasionally. The sauce should become somewhat thicker than heavy cream, without sticking or browning on the bottom.
Pour the sauce through a mesh sieve into another pot or heatproof container, gently pressing with a spoon to extract as much liquid as possible from the cooked vegetables without getting any of the pulp. It is now ready for use. If it has to stand for a while, melt a little more butter over the surface to keep it from forming a skin; reheat very gently, stirring, over a heat-deflector such as a Flame Tamer. (Alternatively, put it in the top of a double boiler and reheat over hot water.)
AJÍ DE LECHE
(VENEZUELAN MILK-CHILE INFUSION)
Ají is Caribbean and South American Spanish for “chile peppers,” as well as the name for various sauces or infusions based on them—for instance, this Venezuelan table sauce made with milk, to which I was introduced by the endlessly knowledgeable Maricel Presilla. Maricel loves it with fish. I could eat it with nearly anything. Like the little experiment with smoked fish or onion on this page, it is an object lesson in how milk absorbs and transforms strong, penetrating flavors. (Do not expect the consistency to resemble a chunky salsa; it will be as thin as milk.)
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