In France, soup is not just soup. What in English is called soup, in France may be called crème, velouté, or potage. If the soup is clear it may be a consommé. If the main ingredient is onions and there’s melted cheese on top, the soup may be called a gratinée. Without the cheese it may be called a tourain, but a tourain may also be made from garlic. If the soup is prepared in a particular pot called a marmite, then the soup may be called a marmite, too. (In other countries, a marmite may be thought of as more of a stew than a soup.) If the soup is thick, creamy, and made from crustaceans, then it may be called a bisque. If the soup is made from vegetables and ham, it made be called a garbure. Sometimes, just to provide more confusion, a soup in French is called a soupe.
Escoffier, in Le Guide Culinaire (1902), provided a strict classification system so that each different type of soup was defined and its name would always mean the same thing, but his system has not made it into general usage. Chefs today run fast and loose when naming soups. But this is nothing new, Escoffier complained that “It can be frequently seen, particularly in the case of thick soups, that the same [recipe] is used indiscriminately for bisque, purées, coulis, and veloutés as well as for crèmes, whereas each term should logically designate a particular preparation of which the [recipe] for each is totally different.” [A Escoffier, Le Guide Culinaire, (HL Cracknell, RJ Kaufman, translators), New York: Mayflower Books, 1982, page 65.]
The soup recipes presented in this article were culled from a variety of modern and traditional sources. Each is presented for making either two or four 225-ml (7-fl. oz.) servings. They represent a mere sampling of the many French soup recipes available — Escoffier alone presents over 400 soup recipes in Le Guide Culinaire — but they also represent the broad variety of soup types and ingredients found in French cuisine today. |
