From:
The Thorough Good Cook
Soups: 17. Potato or Parmentier Soup
I have given an
alternative "fancy" title to this
excellent pottage in remembrance of the
philanthropist who was the first to introduce the
potato into French cookery. Parmentier was a military
apothecary, who, late in the last century, had learnt to believe in the dietetic value of the potato while serving with the French armies in
Germany. At the outset he had to encounter the bitterest opposition both from the French Academy of Sciences and the French
clergy. Who first declared the tuber to be
poisonous; the latter denounced it as a, "
Protestant"
vegetable. Parmentier, however, succeeded in obtaining the support of
Benjamin Franklin and of Lavoisier; but his triumph was completed when he induced
Marie Antoinette to accept, and wear in her bosom, a bouquet of potato flowers. "La Liberte- et les Patatas" = "Liberty and Potatoes ", was a popular cry in
Paris in the early days of
the French Revolution; and the strip of ornamental
garden of the Palace of the Tuileries was planted with seed potatoes.
Slice ten large Potatoes (kidneys are the best), blanch them; stew them in stock with two leeks and a head of
celery tied up, and the
crumb of a Frenh roll; when they break under the pressure of the
finger, take out the bunch of herbs, and run the potatoes through a tammy; mix with a sufficient quantity of
stock, clarify the whole, add a pinch of
sugar and a little
nutmeg. When serving, just after
boiling point, mix in a pint of
milk - nursery milk if you can get it and if you can afford it - a third of a pint of
double cream and a pat of fresh
butter. Pour the soup into a tureen with some blanched chervil; fried crusts as usual, to make it more toothsome. This is a
cheap soup without the
cream, and eminently relishable. You may also make a clear Parmentier soup by using; finely shredded potatoes mingled with shredded
onions in the
broth, and leaving out the milk and cream.