Pride and Prejudice
WHITE GARLIC SOUP
One of the questions I dread being asked most is “What’s your favorite book?” It’s not that I don’t have an answer, or that my answer is always changing, or that it’s some obscure book you’ve never heard of, it’s just that my answer always seems to disappoint people a little bit. The fact is that Pride and Prejudice is my favorite book. There, I’ve said it. I’ve read it well over fifty times since my junior year of high school and have found something new to love about it on every single read. But somehow saying that it’s my favorite book always feels kind of obvious, like saying Andy Warhol is your favorite artist, or Adventures in Babysitting is your favorite movie. (No? Just me?)
When I first read Pride and Prejudice at age sixteen, I knew nothing of Jane Austen’s enduring influence and popularity. What I did know was that I was an American teenager, reading the book nearly two hundred years after its first publication, and not only did I understand it, but it was making me laugh out loud. This type of reading experience is at the core of what makes Austen extraordinary—that her wit and humor and portrayal of the human condition are still relatable and relevant, even cross-culturally.
There are many reasons that Austen has remained a household name while so many of her contemporaries—authors like Fanny Burney, Charlotte Lennox, and Eliza Haywood, who were also writing novels of social satire and domestic comedy—have fallen by the wayside. Austen’s ability to write a fully realized and compelling story without burdening it with overly intricate details is a large part of her staying power.
As a reader, I never feel as if Austen’s novels are lacking in detail because I can imagine her characters and settings so clearly, but if you actually go back and look for the particulars you will find only vague outlines. There is no lengthy description of Elizabeth Bennet’s face, or the dress that Jane wore to the Netherfield ball. We never know Mr. Darcy’s exact height, or just how beautiful the library at Pemberley really is—and yet we see all of these things in our heads so clearly. Austen allows us to build these details ourselves, to imagine elements of our own lives within the novel’s confines, which is, I think, part of the reason that people feel so invested in and connected to her books.
This lack of specificity extends to food—Austen’s novels are full of food and eating, but we rarely hear about any of it. The characters in Pride and Prejudice are forever sitting down to breakfast and commenting on how splendid their dinner was, they spar over luncheons and play cards after supper—but what are they eating? In her letters, Austen wrote constantly of the food she ate—lobster and asparagus, cheesecake, apple tarts, spareribs, rice pudding, pea soup, sponge cake—but in Pride and Prejudice she tells us only “the dinner was exceedingly handsome.”
No matter how much I love Pride and Prejudice, I find its lack of food description excruciating. One scene in particular drove me crazy for years, and had me searching for Regency-era cookbooks whenever I went to the library. In the scene, Bingley tells his sister that he has decided to throw a ball at Netherfield, and that he will send out invitations “as soon as Nicholls has made white soup enough.” What does this mean?! Why is time being measured by the creation of a really boring-sounding soup?! Curiously enough, I found the answer in Jane Grigson’s English Food while looking for a recipe to make a traditional English-style cured ham for Austen’s Emma.
White soup, it turns out, has a long history, dating back to medieval England and France, where it was served only in the wealthiest households. Given the aristocratic and courtly French origins of the soup, it seems that Bingley is saying that only the best will do for his finicky houseguests—Mr. Darcy, who is wealthy enough to keep a French cook, and Mr. Hurst, who prefers French cooking. Bingley’s own humble English cook, Nicholls, will have to try her very hardest to impress these gentlemen, and as soon as she feels up to the task, they will have a ball. It’s a small moment, one that is certainly not crucial to the plot, but understanding these small moments furthers our understanding of the world that Austen was writing about, which to me is important.
Recipes for white soup, sometimes called potage à la blanc or soupe à la reine, varied from kitchen to kitchen, but usually had a base of veal stock, cream, and almonds, and sometimes included bread crumbs, leeks, egg yolks, or rice. John Farley gives a recipe in his 1783 book The Art of London Cookery:
Put a knuckle of veal into six quarts of water, with a large fowl, and a pound of lean bacon; half a pound of rice, two anchovies, a few peppercorns, a bundle of sweet herbs, two or three onion [sic], and three or four heads of celery cut in slices. Stew them all together, till the soup be as strong as you would have it, and strain it through a hair sieve into a clean earthen pot. Having let it stand all night, the next day, take off the scum, and pour it clear off into a tossing-pan. Put in half a pound of Jordan almonds beat fine, boil it a little, and run it through a lawn sieve. Then put in a pint of cream, and the yolk of an egg, and send it up hot.
I tried this recipe, and any others I could get my hands on for white soup, and I’m sorry to tell you that I hated them all. The texture was funny, the almonds a little bit too sweet, the veal stock too jellied.
Before finding out what white soup actually was, I had spent years imagining what it could be—I thought maybe cauliflower or parsnip, potato and leek, or a fish chowder—and it’s most likely because I had imagined all of these possibilities that the real soup didn’t taste quite right to me. So, in the tradition of using our imaginations and filling in the blanks, as Austen so often asks us to do when reading her books, I’ve made a creamy, white garlic soup as a stand-in for the true almond and veal concoction. It’s hardly courtly but it’s certainly delicious—worth the risk that no one will want to kiss you at the ball after you’ve eaten it.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
White Garlic Soup
Serves 6 to 8
20 garlic cloves, peeled
2 cups whole milk
20 garlic cloves, unpeeled
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 small white onion, roughly chopped
Leaves of 5 thyme sprigs
4 cups chicken stock
1 cup heavy cream
Kosher salt
Freshly cracked black pepper
⅓ cup grated Parmesan cheese
The night before making the soup (or at least 4 hours before), put the peeled garlic cloves in a bowl, cover with the whole milk, cover the bowl, and place in the refrigerator. This will help leach out the bitter, spicy edge of the garlic. After the garlic has soaked overnight, discard the milk and reserve the soaked garlic cloves.
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
Combine the olive oil and unpeeled garlic cloves in a Dutch oven, cover, and roast until deeply golden brown, 30 to 45 minutes. Once the garlic cloves are roasted, squeeze them gently to remove them from their husks.
Heat the butter in a large stockpot over medium-low heat. Add the onion and thyme and cook until the onion is translucent, about 8 minutes. Add the chicken stock, cream, roasted garlic, and soaked raw garlic to the pot and increase the heat to medium. When the mixture comes to a gentle boil, lower the heat again and simmer for 5 minutes.
Remove the soup from the heat and transfer about one-third of it to a blender. (Note: Hot soup creates steam, and this steam has nowhere to go in a blender, which can lead to scary explosions if you don’t follow this tip: On the lid of your blender there should be a hole that is covered by either a cap or a wand. Remove the cap or the wand and cover the hole with a clean kitchen towel. This gives the steam room to escape, which means the hot soup won’t explode all over you.)
Blend the soup in batches until it is very smooth. Strain through a fine-mesh sieve, season with salt and pepper to taste, top with Parmesan, and serve.