French cooking, broken down into categories that encompass great areas of related dishes, gives us such groups as soups, sauces, salads, pastries. The soups come first in importance, even admitting that sauces play a greater role in French cuisine. For sauce cookery depends upon soup cookery: A good soup stock is a prime requisite in making so many of the famous sauces. Therefore there could hardly be a better way to start this series than to cover thoroughly the art of soup making, from simple bouillons to rich consommés, from modest vegetable soups to elegant crémes and bisques. I'm afraid that it will take three articles to make good soup cooks out of you, mes apprentis, but when you've worked through the three of them there should be no question about your skills in this department.
Let us start first with the simplest of all the potages, the bouillon. Bouillon is the basic extraction, and has so many uses in making both sauces and other soups that no one could hope to produce the great dishes of cuisine classique without knowing how to make bouillon first. (This is often referred to as a broth also, but the terms are pretty much interchangeable; bouillon and broth are the accepted terminology of the extraction when it is served as a soup. Stock is the proper term when the extraction is used in making sauces, consommés, and so on.)
Bouillon, broth, stock—whatever you call it, depending upon its use—is easily made, but not quickly: It does require long cooking. However, it takes care of itself on the range all day while you do other things. It is made from water and either—
bones and vegetables
meat (usually beef), bones, and vegetables
fowl and vegetables
The amount of water used in proportion to the solid ingredients determines the strength of the bouillon, while the combinations and proportions of the solid ingredients determine the flavor. The ideal for which you strive is a good, tasty extraction whose flavor is noticeably of either beef or chicken—or a combination of the two—which is, in turn, enhanced by a blending of vegetable flavors. The latter, however, must be subtle. There must be no one flavor that overpowers the flavor of the bouillon. Carrots, for example, or onions will sometimes overpower it. Leeks, on the other hand, seldom do. In fact, one of the characteristics of leeks seems to be that they blend with other flavors better than anything else that goes into the soup kettle. No French potager, soup chef, could live without his leeks.
Before proceeding to the recipes which follow, I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't emphasize the points that make the difference between making fine soups and just ordinary soups. In soup making remember that slow cooking is the sine qua non. Careful handling of the stock comes next. You must cook it gently, never let it boil vigorously. And watch it while it comes to the boil and during the first half hour or so of cooking, so that you can skim off the scum iliac rises to the surface: Stirring the bouillon once or twice at this stage and adding about half a cup of cold water once or twice will encourage the scum to rise. As soon as the scum stops rising, cover the kettle and let the soup cook so slowly that it just simmers. If you arc making your potage from bones it can cook all day; if you are making it from a piece of beef or a fowl it should be cooked only until the meat is tender.
When the bouillon is done, carefully lift out the meat or fowl, if either is included, and the bones and vegetables. Use a skimmer or perforated spoon for the latter, so that you will disturb the bouillon as little as possible. Let the kettle stand a few minutes without touching it, to allow most of the tiny particles that have cooked out of the solid ingredients to settle at the bottom. Then place a piece of cheesecloth in a strainer and ladle the liquid through it, working from the surface and taking great care not to stir up the sediment. (If you set the strainer on top of a quart measure that has a pouring lip, the strained bouillon can be conveniently transferred into jars for cooling and storing.) As you fill the jars set them in a pan of cold water to cool quickly. As soon as the stock is cold, put it in the refrigerator. Always cool any soups that are to be stored as quickly as possible, and never cover them while cooling. For some reason they take on a strange, rather unpleasant flavor if left covered after the cooking has stopped. Usually there will be a layer of fat that hardens on top of the bouillon, or stock, when it is cold so that a cover is not even necessary during storage in the refrigerator.
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