soupsong.com

Ahem, may I first say:  it’s a great day to be an American.

Okay, I promised you Madame de Pompadour, a Sèvres tureen, and a soup recipe, and I am going to deliver.  Just look at the pictured beauties.  Disoriented from 3 weeks under the hot blue skies of Amman, I set out on a cold, rainy lunch hour to reconnect with Paris.  Bang!  Almost immediately I found this gorgeous pot à oille, (a round instead of oval tureen) in the Petit Palais, just across and up the street from my office.  Funny how one little item can lead you such a merry chase all over French history, manners, customs, and cuisine.

It turns out that soup tureens were not made or used until the late 17th century.  Before then, poor families would eat directly out of the cooking pot with big spoons; rich families had their soup ladled from the kitchen marmite into individual bowls, covered, and served at table.

Then Saxony porcelain companies created gorgeous tureens for serving the soup course at table.  Think Royal Meissen/Dresden china.  Suddenly there was a charming way to focus attention on the Lord or Lady of the table doing the ladling, which, after all, is graceful and not as tricky as carving a roast.  This new fashion caught the attention of Louis XV’s official mistress, Madame de Pompadour, and she thought it would be awfully nice to rival Dresden with a French china that would blow it out of the water.  That’s when she discovered the small Sèvres factory around Chateau de Vincennes, very French, on the southeastern corner of Paris.

In no time at all she got the King’s interest and endorsement, moved the operation not far from Versailles, and hired the most exquisite artists (Boucher!) and craftsman to produce a soft-paste porcelain brilliant with colors and designs never before imagined.  Like the beauty pictured here.

And there you have it.  At the end of the production line, there were the petits soupers, two or three times a week, where Madame de Pompadour would cosily serve the King and an intimate group of guests–like her favorite, Voltaire–in the King’s private dining room, appropriately decorated with De Troy’s “Lunch with Oysters” and Lancret’s “Lunch with Ham.”  On the menu:  an exquisite soup to whet the appetite.

Two have come down through history named after the woman herself.  The clear Soupe à la Pompadour is a delicate consommé thickened with tapioca, then heated with thin strips of black Italian truffles (ideally from Norcia in Umbria), of poached chicken breasts, and of tongue.  The thick Purée a la Pompadour , by contrast, is a tomato purée garnished with pearls of sago palm and a julienne of lettuces. I am going to try them out this week and post the recipes on the weekend.  Perfect for an election party?  Why not?