Boil a large chicken in 3 quarts of water; season with salt, sage and pepper; add 1 onion chopped and cook until tender. Remove the chicken and chop it fine; then add to the soup with the yolks of 3 well-beaten eggs; let all get very hot. Sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve at once.
A plain chicken soup thickened with egg yolks rather than flour. The whole thing turns on how you add the eggs.
- Temper the yolksBeat the three yolks in a bowl, whisk in a ladleful of hot broth to warm them, then stir that mixture back into the pot off the heat. Adding cold yolks straight to a simmering pot gives you shreds of scrambled egg.
- "Let all get very hot" means do not boil"Let all get very hot" is best read as "do not boil" -- hold the finished soup below a simmer, stirring, until it thickens slightly and looks silky. Let it approach the boil and the yolks will curdle and the soup separate.
- The birdA "large chicken" in a book of this vintage may well have been an older stewing fowl, and no cooking time is given. A 4-5 lb roasting chicken needs roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours at a bare simmer; an older stewing hen can take considerably longer.
- Water and reductionThree quarts is generous for one bird. Expect to lose a quart or more to evaporation over a long simmer, which is what concentrates the broth; don't top it up unless the meat is going dry.
- Sage, not paprikaDespite the name, there is no paprika here at all, which is unusual for anything Hungarian. Sage is assertive with chicken -- start with half a teaspoon dried or a few fresh leaves and taste before adding more.
- Skim and strainSkim the grey foam in the first ten minutes and lift the fat off before the yolks go in. Fat and egg together will make the surface look broken.
- Chopping the chickenDiscard skin and bones and chop the meat fine, as directed, rather than shredding it -- fine dice suspends in the thickened broth instead of sinking.
- YieldSix to eight bowls as a first course, four as a main. It does not reheat well once the yolks are in; warm gently and never let it come to the boil.
Egg-yolk-thickened broths run through central and eastern European home cooking, where a yolk or two was the cheapest way to give a thin soup body and colour before roux or cream became standard; the Greek *avgolemono* works on the same principle. What this page really shows is how loosely national labels were applied in American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century. The page gives each day of the year a dish under a foreign name -- July 5 Indian, July 7 Yorkshire -- and the label often marked little more than a single gesture the compiler thought exotic. Here that gesture is the egg yolk finish, since the sage, onion and parsley would have looked entirely familiar in any English or American kitchen, and the paprika a Hungarian cook would have reached for is absent.