Plateau Cheese Soup
A broth layered with stale bread and fresh tomme until thick, stringy, and comforting—the dish for cold mountain nights.
A broth layered with stale bread and fresh tomme until thick, stringy, and comforting—the dish for cold mountain nights.
Listen to me: when you sleep in the woods and you're freezing, it's not a big speech you need, it's a steaming pot. We'd throw the hard bread at the bottom, cover it with local tomme, and drown it all in broth. The lads came back soaked from an ambush, they'd dip in their spoon and not say a word—a good sign, believe me. I wasn't the best cook in France, but that soup I served a hundred times and no one ever left their bowl.
- •Stale wholemeal bread — several thick slices (thickening base)
- •Fresh Cantal tomme — a generous portion (stringy cheese)
- •Vegetable or bone broth — a large potful (liquid)
- •Onion — a few (aromatic base)
- •Lard or butter — a spoonful (fat)
- •Salt — to taste (seasoning)
Plateau Cheese Soup
A broth layered with stale bread and fresh tomme until thick, stringy, and comforting—the dish for cold mountain nights.
Why this dish? Nancy Wake spent months hidden on the Auvergne plateaus, around Montluçon and the Cantal, training and feeding hundreds of maquisards. The bread and cheese soup, assembled in a large pot with whatever the farms provided, was the meal that came back again and again: hot, nourishing, made from almost nothing.
Listen to me: when you sleep in the woods and you're freezing, it's not a big speech you need, it's a steaming pot. We'd throw the hard bread at the bottom, cover it with local tomme, and drown it all in broth. The lads came back soaked from an ambush, they'd dip in their spoon and not say a word—a good sign, believe me. I wasn't the best cook in France, but that soup I served a hundred times and no one ever left their bowl.
Ingredients (period version)
- Stale wholemeal bread — several thick slices (thickening base)
- Fresh Cantal tomme — a generous portion (stringy cheese)
- Vegetable or bone broth — a large potful (liquid)
- Onion — a few (aromatic base)
- Lard or butter — a spoonful (fat)
- Salt — to taste (seasoning)
Ingredients
- Stale country bread — 200 g, sliced (base)
- Fresh tomme (or young grated Cantal) — 300 g (stringy cheese)
- Chicken or vegetable broth — 1.2 L (liquid)
- Onion — 1 large, sliced (aromatic)
- Butter — 20 g (fat)
- Salt and pepper — to taste (seasoning)
Method
- Melt the butter in a Dutch oven and brown the sliced onion.
- Pour in the hot broth and bring to a simmer, lightly salt.
- In an ovenproof dish, layer slices of bread, cover with tomme, repeat alternating.
- Pour the hot broth over the layers until covered.
- Bake at 180 °C for about 25 minutes, until the top is golden and the cheese is stringy.
- Serve piping hot, ladle directly into thick bowls.
How it was made : On the farms of Cantal and Aubrac, cheese soup (sometimes called 'soupe à la tome') was assembled in a terrine and baked in the still-warm bread oven. It was a way to use stale bread and the day's fresh tomme, two things always on hand in the mountains.
The contemporary twist : Served in individual cocottes with a poached egg on the gratinéed crust, a 'foundational soup of the maquis' revisited.
Sources : Russell Braddon, Nancy Wake (1956) · Cuisine traditionnelle d'Auvergne, recueils régionaux
Nancy Wake · Charactorium
