Potatoes liquified, cooked, chilled, and served cold with a sprinkling of chives.
Vichyssoise, like revenge, is a dish best served cold. The English name of this creamy potato and leek soup is a shortened form of its French name, creme vichyssoise glacee, meaning iced cream of Vichy. Louis Diat, a chef at New York’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel who originated the soup around 1914, made Vichy its namesake to honour the French city near where he grew up. The city itself probably acquired its name from the Latin phrase vicus calidus, meaning hot village, in reference to the warm mineral springs that there bubble forth. Vicus also became the English suffix wich, found in the names of towns such as Sandwich and Greenwich. Incidentally, after the World War II, many expatriot French chefs tried unsuccessfully to change the name of the soup to creme Gauloise, meaning Gallic cream, because of their hatred for the wartime government based in Vichy that collaborated with the Nazis.
A chilled soup made from leeks and potatoes, known as a cream soup, was first introduced by Diat, the Chef des Cuisines at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York.