Garbure (sic)

Sunday October 28

We had a chicken carcass; we had a cabbage, or rather what was left of a cabbage after the damn cabbage moths and the even more damned squirrels had had their nibbles. What to do? The answer lay in Larousse Book of Country Cooking: a nice garbure. No, not garbage, though it is another garbage soup. And it has a disputed etymology and a thousand forms like gazpacho and I ain't going there. The constants are white beans (which we used) and duck/goose confit (for which I substituted the chicken carcass), and a smoked ham hock (for which I substituted bacon). But apart from that, I followed the recipe exactly. Here's a recipe that's pretty much the Larousse.

So soak yer beans overnight in yer pressure cooker (this was an especially stony little group and had to be very keenly picked over).
Strip all the good meat off carcass.
Toss busted-up carcass in cooker with a diced onions, 2 or so cloves of garlic, 2 big chopped carrots, 6 or so of cubed potatoes, lots of sprigs of thyme (because thyme is of the essence), a couple of sprigs of parsley, bay leaf, pepper. Pressure cook everything for 20 minutes or until beans is tender.
You could add the bacon directly to the pot, but it might be a tad pale, so I went ahead and fried it up and added some more onions for that smoky taste. Then add it all to the pot with the shredded cabbage, the nice meat, and pressure cook some more (10 minutes).
Fish out the carcass, thyme and parsley branches, add salt if necessary.
Soooooooooooooooooooooooo good.

Barbara's father, who loved bean soups, would have praised Holt to the skies (and even forgiven the bacon) for this one.