Tea
2 quarts Chicken Consommé. 1 teaspoon finely chopped parsley. 1 recipe noodles cut very fine (see below).
PROCESS: Cook fowl same as for Boiled Fowl (do not tie in cheese cloth). Drain fowl from stock, and strain. When cold, remove fat, and clear. Reheat, add noodles, and simmer twenty minutes. Sprinkle with parsley and serve very hot. 1 egg. 1/2 teaspoon salt.
This is a chicken noodle soup built on a clarified consommé, printed here with the noodle dough's ingredients stranded at the end of the list. A few things need translating before it works on a modern stove.
- The noodle doughThe noodle ingredients belong to the dough referred to as "see below," and the printed page reads as our text now gives it. A standard egg noodle of this period is one egg and the salt worked with as much flour as the egg will take up, roughly three-quarters of a cup, kneaded stiff, rested, rolled paper-thin and cut fine.
- Simmer the noodles far less than twenty minutesTwenty minutes would suit noodles rolled and dried hard on a cloth for hours, which may be what was expected, though the recipe does not say so. Fresh-cut fine noodles are done in three to five minutes and will turn to paste and cloud the broth if held longer.
- "Fowl" means a stewing henAn older laying bird, tough but deeply flavoured, simmered two to three hours. Supermarkets rarely stock them; a 4-5 lb roasting chicken works but gives a thinner stock, so expect to reduce it or supplement with wings and backs.
- Clearing the stock"Clear" is the technical step, not a synonym for straining: whisk lightly beaten egg white (with the crushed shell) into the cold degreased stock, bring it slowly to a bare simmer without stirring, let the raft form, then ladle the liquid out through a cloth. Boiling breaks the raft and undoes the work.
- Cook the noodles separately if you want it to stay clearHaving gone to the trouble of a consommé, boil the noodles in salted water and add them to the hot broth at the last moment. Starch shed straight into the pot clouds it.
- Don't tie the bird in clothThe instruction is explicit. Cheesecloth is normally used when the fowl is to be served whole and unbroken; this recipe gives no reason for dispensing with it, but here the stock rather than the bird's appearance is what the dish wants.
- YieldTwo quarts of finished soup serves six to eight as a first course.
- Section heading"Tea" is a meal heading carried over from the book's menu structure, not an ingredient in the soup.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to a genre of early twentieth-century American cookbooks organised as a year of complete menus, in which a Sunday's fowl or joint could reappear later in the week — the stock from a boiled fowl becoming consommé, the consommé becoming this noodle soup, the meat becoming a croquette or a salad. Noodles rolled and cut at home were common in such books; the English word comes from the German Nudel, and egg-and-flour noodles were well established in American cooking by this date. Clearing broth with egg white is older still, a French professional technique that reached domestic cooks through the household manuals of the 1800s. The cross-reference structure — "cook fowl same as for Boiled Fowl," "see below" — is what makes pages like this read oddly on their own, since they were never meant to be read alone.