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Cream of Rice Soup
Boil the uncooked breast of a fowl and a cup of rice in chicken broth until it is soft enough to rub through a sieve. Thin the paste thus formed with. boiling milk. Season with salt, pepper and nutmeg to the consistency of cream. Excellent.- Mrs. E. A. B.
One quart ripe tomatoes.
One pint water.
A velvet-textured purée soup of the sort that filled the first course of formal 1900s dinners. Note that the last two lines — "One quart ripe tomatoes. One pint water." — are typesetting spillover from the following recipe and have nothing to do with this one.
- What "a fowl" meansA fowl was a mature laying hen, tougher and far more flavourful than a modern broiler. One boneless skinless chicken breast (about 8-10 oz) stands in, though you will want good stock to make up the flavour the old bird supplied.
- Rice choiceUse a starchy white rice — long-grain or a medium grain such as arborio — and cook it well past al dente. Parboiled or converted rice resists breaking down and will leave the soup grainy rather than creamy.
- Liquid quantitiesThe original gives none. Simmer the breast and 1 cup rice in about 1 quart chicken broth, covered, for 30-40 minutes, adding broth if it goes dry; then thin with roughly 2 cups hot milk. That gives something in the region of five to six cups, enough for about six as a first course.
- The sieve, updatedRubbing hot rice and poached chicken through a sieve was the usual route to smoothness in a kitchen of this date. A blender or food processor does it in under a minute; pass the purée through a fine sieve afterwards if you want the texture the book intended.
- Add the milk boilingThis is the instruction that matters. Cold milk stirred into a hot starch paste sets up lumps and drops the temperature so the soup needs re-heating, which risks scorching the rice solids on the bottom. Scald the milk first and whisk it in gradually.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use a small amount — under 1/4 teaspoon for the whole pot. Nutmeg with milk and white meat is a standard nineteenth-century pairing, but pre-ground nutmeg is flat and it takes a heavier hand to register, which tips the soup medicinal.
- Consistency"To the consistency of cream" means pouring cream, not whipped — thick enough to coat a spoon but still fluid. Rice purée thickens as it cools, so hold back some hot milk and adjust just before serving.
- Season at the endReducing broth concentrates its salt, and commercial stock is saltier than home-made. Taste only after the milk is in.
Cream soups built on a starch purée rather than a flour roux were the refined end of the American soup repertoire around 1900; rice, potato, and barley all served the purpose, and rice gave the palest, most neutral result. The technique descends from the French potage à la reine family, in which pounded white poultry meat was thickened with rice or almonds — a dish generally traced back to the court cookery of early modern France and carried into English and American household books through the nineteenth century. The attribution to "Mrs. E. A. B." marks this as a contributed recipe, the compiled-community model that produced a great many turn-of-the-century cookbooks: neighbours sent in what they made well, and the recipe was printed with initials and a one-word verdict, here "Excellent" — though whether such comments came from the editor or the contributor is often unclear.