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Hollandaise Soup
1 quart vegetable stock, 4 tablespoons Crisco, 4 tablespoons flour, 4 yolks eggs, 1/2 pint cream, 1/2 cup green peas, cooked, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 cup carrot, cut in small pieces, cooked, 1 teaspoon sugar, 1/2 cup cut cucumber, cooked, and 1 teaspoon chopped tarragon.
Trim peas, carrots and cucumbers with round cutter, size and shape of peas. Cook them in boiling water, being careful not to cook them too much. Melt Crisco and flour in stewpan; add stock and let boil well. Break yolks of eggs into a basin and add cream, then add the liaison of egg and cream to stock; let it just come to boil, being careful it does not curdle. Strain into a clean stewpan, add vegetables which have been previously cooked, and tarragon and serve.
A classic velouté finished with an egg-and-cream liaison, garnished with vegetables cut to the size of peas. Everything hinges on the temperature at which the liaison goes in.
- Do not let it boilThe instruction to "let it just come to boil" is the one place the soup fails. Once yolks are in, hold the pan between 170 and 180F, stirring, until it coats a spoon; at a true boil the yolks scramble and the soup grains irreversibly.
- CriscoThe book is a Crisco promotional cookbook, and the shortening is here only as a frying-and-roux fat. Four tablespoons of butter gives a better flavour in a cream soup and behaves identically in the roux.
- Measures1 quart is 4 cups; 1/2 pint of cream is 1 cup. Heavy or whipping cream works well here, though the fat content behind the period word "cream" varied and was often lighter than today's heavy cream.
- Melt Crisco and flourRead this as making a blond roux: melt the fat, stir in the flour, cook two or three minutes without colouring, then add the stock gradually and simmer 10 minutes to lose the raw flour taste.
- Trimming the vegetablesThe "round cutter" is a small melon baller or pea-sized Parisienne scoop. Carrot and cucumber balls need only 3-4 minutes in boiling salted water; they should stay firm, since they go into hot soup afterward.
- StrainingStrain the thickened base before the garnish goes in, not after — the point is to catch any set egg, and the vegetables would be lost in the sieve.
- TarragonA teaspoon of chopped fresh tarragon, added off the heat. Dried tarragon is much stronger and blunter; use about a third as much and add it to the simmering stock instead.
- YieldA quart of stock plus a cup of cream serves six as a first course. It does not reheat well once the liaison is in; make the base ahead and finish at service.
The name follows the French kitchen's habit of labelling anything finished with egg yolks and cream à la hollandaise — the same logic that gives the sauce its name, the Dutch association being traditional rather than documented. Soups of this kind, a white roux base thinned with stock and bound at the last moment with a liaison of yolks and cream, were the backbone of the genteel dinner menu in the early twentieth century, and the pea-sized garnish of carrot, cucumber and green pea is straight out of general professional kitchen practice, where uniform shapes signalled a trained hand. The recipe appears in a cookbook published to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, which explains why a rich cream soup calls for shortening rather than the butter any French kitchen of the period would have used; the book's task was to show that the new fat could stand in anywhere butter or lard once did.