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Princess Soup
Chop very fine 1 cup sorrel, and cook in 1 tablespoon Crisco. Add 1/2 teaspoon sugar, 1/2 teaspoon tarragon or white wine vinegar, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 tablespoon flour, and when boiling add 1 pint hot water. Cook for 1/2 hour, then add 1 quart white stock and a grating of nutmeg and dash of red pepper. Bring to a boil, add beaten yolk of 1 egg and 1 cup cream and serve.
A cream soup of the Crisco-promotional era, thickened with flour and finished with egg yolk. Nothing here is difficult, but two steps decide whether it succeeds: keeping the sorrel out of reactive metal and keeping the finished soup off the boil.
- Never boil after the egg goes inDespite the instruction to "bring to a boil, add beaten yolk," the yolk and cream must go into soup pulled back from the boil, off the heat. Temper the yolk with a ladle of hot soup first, stir it back in, and hold below about 180F or it will curdle into threads.
- SorrelA sharp, lemony leaf sold at farmers' markets and some greengrocers in spring; garden sorrel and French sorrel both work. A cup chopped fine is on the order of 1 to 2 ounces of leaves, stems stripped, depending how tightly packed. Spinach with extra lemon juice is the usual substitute but will not give the same acidity.
- Use a non-reactive panSorrel is high in oxalic acid and will take on a metallic taste and grey colour in bare aluminium or cast iron. Stainless steel or enamelled cast iron only.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it. Any neutral solid or liquid fat does the same job here; a tablespoon of butter suits the sorrel better.
- White stockAn unbrowned stock from veal or poultry bones, simmered without roasting the bones first, so the soup stays pale. Unsalted chicken stock is the practical stand-in, and reduce the teaspoon of salt if your stock is already seasoned.
- Half an hour on the sorrelThe long cook presumably softens the acid and cooks out the raw flour; the recipe gives no reason. The leaves will collapse to a dull olive puree within minutes, which is expected in this style of soup; nothing you do will keep them green.
- YieldRoughly six cups finished, or four generous first-course servings. Serve at once in warmed cups, with croutons if you want texture, since the soup cannot be reheated hard once the yolk is in.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbook that was really advertising: Procter & Gamble commissioned Marion Harris Neil to write recipes in which Crisco, introduced in 1911, replaced butter, lard and suet throughout. The soup is French in outline — a potage named for a personage, in the manner of Dubarry or Princesse, where the flattering name signals a smooth, pale, cream-finished soup rather than any fixed set of ingredients. Sorrel soup proper (potage germiny in its most famous version, also thickened with yolks and cream) was a fixture of spring menus when sorrel was one of the first sharp green things out of the kitchen garden, and its presence here is a reminder that seasonal acidity used to come from a leaf rather than a lemon.