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Cream of Lettuce Soup
2 cups White Stock. 2 heads lettuce. 2 tablespoons rice. 2 tablespoons butter. 1 teaspoon finely chopped onion. 1/2 cup hot cream. 1 egg yolk.
Salt and pepper.
Few grains nutmeg.
PROCESS: Cook the onion in butter five minutes (without browning), add rice, lettuce finely chopped, and stock, cover and cook until rice is soft; add hot cream, slightly beaten yolk of egg and seasonings. Do not allow soup to boil after adding egg yolk. Discard outer leaves of lettuce, using only the hearts for soup.
A light summer soup from the era when lettuce came to market in gluts and cooks put it in the pot rather than waste it. The one thing that matters is the finish: once the yolk goes in, the soup must not boil.
- The egg-yolk liaisonTemper the yolk by whisking a ladle of the hot soup into it before returning it to the pan, then hold the soup below a simmer, around 160-175F. A boil curdles the yolk into threads and there is no recovering it.
- White stockAn unbrowned stock made from veal or chicken bones with aromatics, no colour, no tomato. A mild low-sodium chicken stock is the closest supermarket equivalent; season at the end since two cups of commercial stock can carry a lot of salt on its own.
- Two heads of lettuceLettuce heads of the period were generally smaller and looser than a modern iceberg. Use butterhead or romaine, hearts only; the recipe gives no volume, so judge by the pot.
- Rice as thickenerTwo tablespoons of raw long-grain or short-grain rice, not converted or parboiled. It needs 18 to 25 minutes covered at a bare simmer to break down; the starch, not flour, is what gives the soup body.
- TextureThe original leaves the soup chunky. Blending after the rice is soft but before the cream and yolk go in gives the smooth, pale-green result the name suggests, and it is easier to control the finish that way.
- Hot creamHeavy cream, warmed but not boiled, so it does not shock the soup off temperature. Half a cup in a batch this size is generous; single cream or half-and-half works if you want it lighter.
- NutmegGrate it fresh over the pot at the end. Pre-ground nutmeg that has sat in a jar contributes almost nothing here, and the whole point of "few grains" is a scent rather than a flavour.
- YieldTwo cups of stock plus half a cup of cream, with the rice and lettuce, makes roughly two to three first-course servings.
Cooked lettuce is older in European kitchens than salad is in American ones, and lettuce soups and purees appear in English and French cookery from the eighteenth century onward, often as a way of using heads that had begun to bolt in warm weather. Lettuce runs to seed in midsummer heat, the hearts staying tender while the outer leaves turn coarse and bitter, so the instruction to discard the outer leaves may be a seasonal note as much as a culinary one. The construction -- an aromatic softened in butter, a starch cooked to the point of collapse, then cream and a yolk stirred in off the heat -- is a familiar American cream-soup formula of the 1900s and 1910s, associated with the cooking-school tradition.