Name: Potage Billy-By
Yield: Serves 6
Cuisine: France
Ingredients: 1 small onion or 2 shallots, peeled and finely chopped; pinch of saffron (no more than a dozen strands if you have fresh); 100 ml double cream; 1 leek, prepared the same way as the carrot; 1 carrot, peeled and cut into thin strips no thicker than a match; 1 garlic clove, peeled and very finely chopped; 300 ml white wine; 1.5 kg of mussels, prepared; 1 bay leaf; 1 sprig parsley, leaves picked clean of stalks, finely chopped (keep the stalks); chopped parsley leaves

Preparation info

Serves
6

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

Soho Cooking

By Alastair Little

Published 1999

About

A regular dish on the menu in my early Soho days. These formative years were spent in thrall to the glories of classical French cooking, in particular that provided by the exalted temples of gastronomy with three Michelin stars. Maxim’s was one of these, possibly the most famous restaurant in the world, but even in the early 1970s, well past its prime. Too broke to even contemplate eating there, I did the next best thing: read about it. The bible was by