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YOU KNOW IT’S SPRING WHEN dreaded Daylight Savings Time kicks in and we walk around like Zombies. I highly suggest this springtime potato soup as a cure. It’s creamy and comforting but enlivened with leeks that say, listen up, we’ve got some better weather ahead so stop complaining about the time! Ladled warm into a bowl with good soda bread on the side, it’s absolutely Irish and perfect for St. Patrick’s Day this weekend. But if it were chilled, it might be the classic vichyssoise, a darling of Julia Child. Julia, who wrote detailed recipes that could go on and on, loved one of the world’s simplest soups. She called it potage Parmentier, a leek or onion and potato soup, which she would chill and enrich with heavy cream for vichyssoise or puree with watercress.
If you’ve dined in France or have read French cookbooks, you might know the word ‘’Parmentier’’ is a drumroll that signals potato in a recipe.That’s odd, don’t you think, since potato translates into French as pomme de terre and literally back into English as ‘’apple of the earth’’? Leave it to the French to name potato recipes for the man who was the spud’s greatest advocate—Antoine Augustin Parmentier, an 18th century French pharmacist who survived imprisonment during the Seven Years War by eating, that’s right, potatoes. The potato is native to South America and traveled to Europe in the late 1500s where it was viewed with suspicion and thought to be poisonous to humans or even cause leprosy. But famine was a persistent problem. After a failed wheat harvest in 1770, Parmentier suggested farmers grow potatoes on their fallow land.
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