Crème d’Ignames, otherwise Brésilienne

Crème d’Ignames (true yam cream soup), otherwise Brésilienne, teaches a clear and useful principle: bake a starchy root when you want sweetness without water, then control its body with hot liquid. Here, igname means a true yam, dry and pale when cooked, not an orange sweet potato. Bake, don't boil. That is the one true thing to know before you touch a pan.

The original formula assumed a saucier with Béchamel (milk sauce thickened with a pale roux) ready, a pot of consommé never off the fire, and a tammy cloth for passing a brigade batch. Your home equivalents are one small pan of thin Béchamel, a sturdy fine-mesh sieve used twice, and good prepared consommé for poaching the pearls, all scaled to about two quarts. The separate sauce station and tammy are scaffolding; baking the yams in their skins, sieving the pulp while hot, preserving the two-to-one measure of boiling milk to thin Béchamel, and poaching the garnish in consommé are the dish and stay. One cook, one stove, one evening.

Finished, Brésilienne is ivory and quietly sweet, with translucent pearls carrying a savory whisper of consommé through the cream. It should pour with a satin body, never sit like mashed yam. Work swiftly from opened yam to sieve because the pulp firms as it cools; if it does, warm it gently and continue. The hot first pass is the step that decides the soup.