Let’s see off the winter with a bowl of creamy mushroom soup, a classic French recipe lightened in this version by using a mixture of cream and milk instead of pure cream. A dash of lemon juice adds tang, and herbs also brighten the flavor. The soup is hearty enough to make a fine main dish at lunchtime, perhaps followed by a salad, and can be served as a first course at dinner or in small glasses as a palate teaser at cocktail hour.
Velouté de champignons / Creamy mushroom soup
This soup is known as a velouté because of its creamy texture. The word, which derives from velours (‘velvet’), has been part of the French culinary repertoire since the 1700s, when it was used to refer to creamy desserts or sauces. The great French chef Escoffier was reputedly the first to create a soup called a velouté, and it was considerably richer than modern versions, being thickened with both cream and egg yolk.
These days chefs sometimes dispense with the cream altogether when making a velouté (as in the recipes for broccoli soup and butternut soup already on this site). Other recipes call for cream in one form or another — heavy cream, crème fraîche, sour cream or, for vegans, coconut cream (e.g. with velouté of watercress or creamy zucchini soup).
Mushroom soup may also be made without cream. For example, there are delicious East European versions that use mushrooms with potatoes, onion, dill and sometimes carrots. But I’ve never encountered a French version that didn’t call for cream.
So, yes, velouté de champignons is comfort food. Never mind the calories, we still need comfort food here in Paris, having just gone through the grayest year in 30 years (see view out my bedroom window of a typical January morning). Météo-France, the French weather service, reports that Paris enjoyed only 1,509 hours of sunshine in 2024. I did the math. This means that the sun broke through during daylight hours only about a third of the time.
And the gray goes on, with cloudy skies as I write. Here’s hoping that, in this grayest of seasons, we will finally start to get some serious sunshine before my next post, when we can lighten up the menu for spring. In the meantime…
Happy cooking.
