Norfolk Puree
1/2 cupful barley, pearl 1 quart water 3 pints white stock 1/2 cupful cream 1 yolk of egg 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 4 tablespoonfuls cooked carrot balls 4 tablespoonfuls cooked peas Salt, pepper, and paprika to taste Diced toast or fried bread Put barley into saucepan of cold water, bring to boil, let boil five minutes, then drain off water; this removes the slightly bitter taste. Now put barley into saucepan with Crisco and water, let these boil gently until barley is tender, drain, and rub through sieve. Add stock to this puree and let simmer ten minutes. Beat yolk of egg with cream and when soup has cooled slightly, strain them in. Stir soup over fire a few minutes to reheat; but be careful that it does not boil, or it will curdle. Season carefully, add carrot balls and peas, which should first be heated in a little stock or water. Serve with dice of toast or fried bread. If you do not possess a round vegetable cutter, cut the carrot into small dice. This is a particularly nourishing soup. If you prefer a slightly cheaper variety, use milk instead of cream, and if you have no white stock use milk and water in equal proportions instead, and cook a carrot, turnip and onion in milk and water for twenty or thirty minutes.
A pearl barley cream soup thickened at the last moment with egg yolk, from one of the Crisco-sponsored cookbooks of the 1910s. The single instruction that matters is the liaison: once the egg goes in, the soup must never boil.
- The egg-and-cream liaisonTake the pot off the heat, let it drop below a simmer, then strain in the beaten yolk and cream. Return it to low heat only long enough to thicken slightly, around 170-175F. Anything approaching a boil will scramble the yolk and leave grainy specks that no amount of stirring will fix.
- MeasuresA cupful is 8 fl oz, so half a cupful of barley is about 3.5 oz. Three pints of white stock is 6 cups, and a quart of water is 4 cups. The finished yield is roughly 2 quarts, serving six as a first course.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote the shortening, and here it does nothing a spoonful of butter would not do better in a barley soup. Two tablespoons of butter or a neutral oil is a direct substitution.
- White stockA pale, unroasted veal or chicken stock, made from bones blanched rather than browned, so the soup keeps its ivory colour. Unsalted chicken stock is the practical modern stand-in; roasted brown stock will muddy both the flavour and the look.
- Blanching the barleyThe five-minute boil-and-drain is worth keeping. It carries off the dusty, faintly bitter starch on the polished grains and keeps the finished puree clean-tasting.
- Cooking and sievingPearl barley wants 40 to 50 minutes of gentle simmering to go properly soft. A blender or food processor does the sieve's work in seconds, though passing it through a fine strainer afterwards is what gives the velvety texture the recipe is after.
- The garnishCarrot balls cut with a small melon baller are a period flourish; the recipe itself allows plain small dice if you have no round vegetable cutter. Add the carrots and peas warmed and at the very end so they stay distinct in the pale puree.
- The cheaper versionThe milk-and-water alternative with a carrot, turnip and onion simmered in it is essentially a quick vegetable infusion standing in for stock. It works, but keep the heat low: milk scorches on the bottom of the pan far more readily than stock.
This comes from a Crisco-era American cookbook, one of a genre of volumes issued by manufacturers to demonstrate that a new hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard. The dish itself belongs to an older and grander tradition: the French puree soups codified in nineteenth-century professional kitchens, where a starchy base was sieved smooth, let down with white stock and finished with a liaison of egg yolk and cream. English and American cookery books borrowed the form wholesale and attached English county names to the variations, which is the likeliest explanation for "Norfolk" here rather than any documented connection to the county. Barley was the cheap, filling grain, which is why the author calls the result "particularly nourishing" and offers a milk-and-water version for households that could not spare the stock or the cream.