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Victor Sack[_1_]

> wrote:

> There is this one chef I work with who swears up and down that
> vichyssoise is a fish stew. Everyone else, including myself, says
> it's a potato and leek soup served cold.

Dismiss the chef. Crème vichyssoise glacée, basically just a version of
potage Parmentier served cold, was a creation of sorts of Louis Diat, a
great French chef at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York, in 1917. In
his "Gourmet's Basic French Cookbook" he remembers how his mother added
cold milk to her leek and potato soup on hot days. "Hotel Bemelmans" by
Ludwig Bemelmans describes, at least in part, I believe, some of the
goings-on at the Hotel at the time of Diat.

Victor