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Cream of Almond Soup
2 quarts chicken or white stock. 1½ tablespoons butter. 3/4 cup blanched almonds. 2 tablespoons cornstarch. 1 cup hot cream.
Salt, pepper.
Few grains nutmeg.
PROCESS: Cook the butter and flour together in a sauce-pan; add gradually hot stock until of the consistency to pour; then add remaining stock, let cook gently twenty minutes. Chop almonds fine, then pound them to a paste, add to first mixture and beat until thoroughly blended. Add hot cream and seasoning. Serve en tasse; sprinkle each portion with finely chopped parsley.
A white almond soup of the sort served in cups before a heavy holiday dinner. Two of the quantities in the original are garbled, so read the list against the method before you start.
- The butter measure is broken"1/2 tablespoons butter" looks like a printing error, since the method calls for cooking butter and flour together and half a tablespoon is very little fat for a roux thickening two quarts of stock. A dropped digit ("1 1/2") or something nearer 2 tablespoons are both plausible readings; the original is genuinely ambiguous here.
- Cornstarch or flour, not bothThe ingredient list says cornstarch, the method says flour. Either works: 2 tablespoons cornstarch gives a lighter, glossier body, 3 tablespoons flour a more opaque velouté. Cornstarch needs only a minute or two to thicken, so with it the twenty-minute simmer is about melding flavor rather than cooking out starch.
- Pounding the almondsThe point of pounding blanched almonds to a paste rather than merely chopping them is to release the milky emulsion that gives the soup its body. A food processor with a little of the hot stock added does this in a minute; ground almond meal alone stays gritty.
- White stockA pale unroasted stock made from veal or chicken bones and aromatics, with no browning. Any light chicken stock serves; avoid dark or heavily reduced commercial broth, which will muddy the color the recipe is built around.
- Keep the cream off the boilAdd the hot cream at the end and hold the pan below a simmer. Boiling after the cream goes in risks curdling and dulls the almond flavor, which is delicate to begin with.
- Strain if you want it smoothEven well pounded, almonds leave a slight texture. Passing the finished soup through a fine sieve or chinois gives a smoother, paler result, though the recipe itself does not call for straining.
- En tasseServed in cups — two-handled bouillon cups or small teacups — and drunk rather than spooned. Two quarts plus a cup of cream fills about ten to twelve such cups, or serves six to eight as a bowl course.
- SeasoningNutmeg and white pepper rather than black, so the soup stays unspecked. Salt at the end; the stock will have concentrated during the twenty-minute simmer.
Pounded almonds thickened and enriched broths in medieval and Renaissance kitchens long before roux and cream became standard, and they were especially valued on fast days, when almond milk stood in for dairy. By the time this book was printed, the dish had shifted meaning \, pcup-served opener for a formal dinner, one of the family of "cream of" soups that filled the first course in American middle-class entertaining. It suits that use: a light, rich, faintly sweet cup ahead of a roast, requiring nothing seasonal and no last-minute attention beyond warming. The instruction to serve en tasse with chopped parsley is pure turn-of-the-century table fashion, borrowed from French service along with the phrase itself.