Swiss Soup
Make a stock of lamb or chicken, season with butter, pepper and salt; add a little rice; cook it until tender. Just before taking it up add a cup of cream.-Mrs. F. C. Cottrill.
A cream-and-rice soup of the plainest kind, written for a cook who already knows how much stock a household pot holds. The whole recipe hinges on the last line: the cream goes in off the boil.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. For about 2 quarts of lamb or chicken stock, 1/3 to 1/2 cup of raw long-grain or short-grain rice is right; more than that and the soup sets up as porridge as it cools. Serves six as a first course.
- The creamAdd it at the end, off the heat or at a bare shiver, and do not let the pot return to a boil. Heavy cream will hold, but light cream or half-and-half can break in a very hot pot. A cup is generous for 2 quarts; half that still reads as a cream soup.
- "Season with butter"Butter here is a seasoning, not a cooking fat. One to two tablespoons stirred in near the end, along with the salt and pepper. Season after the rice has swelled, since the grain absorbs liquid and concentrates whatever salt is already there.
- Lamb stockLamb and mutton broths appear often in period cookbooks; today it usually means simmering lamb bones yourself. Chicken stock is the easier substitution and gives a milder soup. Skim the fat well before adding cream, or the finished soup will look greasy.
- Cooking the riceFifteen to twenty minutes at a gentle simmer for white rice, stirred now and then so it does not catch. Taste at fifteen minutes.
- Holding and reheatingRice keeps swelling in the pot. If you make it ahead, expect to loosen it with more stock, and reheat gently so the cream does not curdle.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks attached national names to soups loosely, and what "Swiss" was meant to signal here is not recoverable from the page -- much as with Swiss steak, which has nothing Swiss about it either. What the recipe really shows is the shape of community-cookbook writing: a contributor's name attached, no quantities, no times. Rice-thickened cream soups were a staple of the era's invalid and convalescent cookery as well, being mild, bland and easy to digest, and a lamb broth in particular is often said to have been sickroom fare in Anglo-American households well into the twentieth century.