Chicken Soup
Put on two gallons of water and a slice or two of bacon, with a fat hen. Let it boil until very tender. Remove the fowl, mincing all the white meat and a small portion of the dark. Yolks of two hard-boiled eggs, a tablespoonful of butter, pepper, salt and celery seed to taste. Mix these ingredients into the meat and return to the liquor, at which time it should have boiled down to about two quarts. Stir all together, and as soon as it comes to a boil add one pint of milk and a teaspoonful of flour made into a batter. When it comes to a boil remove from the fire, as the milk is apt to curdle if allowed to boil too long. This is a very rich soup.
A straightforward long-simmered chicken soup finished with an egg-yolk-and-butter liaison and a little milk. Two details decide whether it works: the reduction, and not boiling it after the milk goes in.
- Do not boil after the milkThe original is right about this. Once the pint of milk and flour batter go in, bring it barely to a boil and pull it off. Held at a rolling boil the milk can separate into curds and the soup will look broken.
- A fat henThis means an older laying hen, fatty and full of connective tissue, which is what gives the broth body. Supermarket chicken has no equivalent; use a 4-6 lb stewing hen if a butcher has one, otherwise a whole roasting chicken plus a few extra wings or feet for gelatin.
- The reduction is the recipeTwo gallons down to two quarts is a 75 percent reduction, and it is where all the flavor comes from. Expect 3 to 4 hours at a bare simmer in a wide pot. The bird will be tender long before the liquid is ready, so lift it out at 1.5 to 2 hours and keep reducing the broth without it.
- Salt from the baconThe slice or two of bacon is a seasoning and a fat source, not a main ingredient. Because the liquid loses three quarters of its volume, whatever salt goes in early concentrates sharply. Salt only at the end, after the reduction.
- The egg yolks and butterMash the two hard-boiled yolks with the tablespoon of soft butter to a smooth paste before working it into the minced meat, or it will stay in yellow crumbs. It adds a noticeable richness, though two yolks will do little to thicken this quantity.
- A teaspoonful of flourThat is a very small amount for two and a half quarts and will do little to thicken the soup. Slake it in a little cold milk first. If you want a thicker soup, a tablespoon is closer to modern expectation.
- Celery seedPotent and easy to overdo. Start with a quarter teaspoon for the whole pot and add more once the milk is in and you can taste the finished soup.
- SkimA fat hen simmered four hours throws a lot of fat. Skim as it reduces, or chill the broth and lift the cap, or the finished soup will be greasy rather than rich.
- YieldAbout two and a half quarts finished, serving eight to ten as a first course.
Soup built on a boiling fowl, then enriched at the last minute with milk and mashed egg yolk, is a standard of nineteenth-century American household cookery, and it exists because of how chickens were kept. A hen was valuable while she laid and went into the pot when she stopped, which meant the bird available for soup was tough, old, and fatty rather than young and tender. Hours of simmering was not an indulgence but the only way to make such a bird edible, and the payoff was a broth thick with gelatin that no quick-cooked modern chicken will match. The egg-yolk-and-butter finish belongs to an older tradition of thickening with eggs rather than roux.