Potage Saint Germain

POTAGE SAINT-GERMAIN

Green Pea Soup

Another dive into The French Cookbook produced a recipe for Potage Saint-Germain, or Green Pea Soup. The French are famous for their soups, so I figured I couldn’t go wrong with this experiment.

First, a word on the ingredients. I have no shame in saying that I used frozen peas, because I was not going to spend the time shelling fresh peas. Also, the original recipe calls for something called “chervil.” I had to Google it to figure out that chervil is a fancy relative of parsley. Again, didn’t have time for that…

Potage Saint-Germain/Green Pea Soup

1 small head lettuce, shredded
2 C shelled fresh green peas
1 C water
½ C chopped leaks (green part only)
2 tbsp fat (I used the leftover fat from the Bacon Quiche)
2 tsp chopped chervil or parsley
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
¼ tsp pepper

Make sure, before you put everything in the pot, to rinse things like lettuce and leaks to get rid of the sand first – nobody wants gritty soup!

Mix all ingredients together in a saucepan. Bring quickly to a boil and cook until peas are tender.

Reserve 3 tbsp peas for garnish. Put remaining mixture through a sieve.

At first I thought they meant strain out the liquid, but then I realized they meant “sieve” like a ricer (which my Mom often uses for making applesauce). Since I don’t have a ricer, I sent it all through my standing blender. In retrospect, I may recommend using an immersion blender if you have one, because it will more thoroughly mix everything and your soup will have less chunks in it than my final product.

Return sieved mixture to the saucepan. Reheat with 2 C bouillon.

Again, when I went to the cited page in the book for the bouillon recipe, I decided I was not about to go to all that trouble today just for pea soup. Instead, I took two beef bouillon cubes, 2 C water, and the rinds from the Gruyére cheese and cooked them together until the cubes had dissolved, then removed the rinds.

Just before serving blend in and heat thoroughly 2 C cream. Garnish with reserved cooked peas.

The resulting soup is this very pretty green concoction. However, it tastes like it's missing something. As I was finishing it, post-cream, I tasted it and decided to add another tbsp of bacon fat and more salt and pepper. The flavor of leak is almost overpowering the other flavors in my soup, but that may be because I used part of the white of the leak (the leaks I could find in the grocery store had almost no green parts to them).

As I said before, I would recommend using an immersion blender, adding more salt and pepper, and only using the greens of the leak (although I will continue to protest about how wasteful these French recipes feel!).

On the whole, though, this is a nice, refreshing vegetable soup that paired nicely with the Bacon Quiche.

Have a question or a request? Put it in the comments below and I’ll be sure to respond. Fröhe essen!