Vichyssoise

This dish of cold cream of potato-leek soup garnished with chives was on the menu of every “authentic” French restaurant in America from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. But it was invented in the United States and has never become popular in France. Crème vichyssoise glacée was invented at the New York Ritz-Carlton Hotel by the French chef Louis Diat, and the recipe was published in 1941. Diat took a humble French potato-leek soup, potage bonne-femme, pureed and chilled it, added rich cream, and presented it over ice. Despite the association of Vichy with a collaborationist French government during World War II, this made an easy and impressive dish for American dinner parties. The Joy of Cooking had two versions (one using both a blender and pressure cooker, and adding cucumber) and carefully warned that the final ‘s’ should be pronounced despite many Americans dropping the ‘s’ in “genteel” fake French. One of the few French writers to take note of it, Raymond Olivier, compares it to Russian chilled soups. Julia Child, coming upon it late in life, labeled it correctly as Diat’s, and opined her preference for his simple cream base over canned chicken broth.