Another Way
When stock is drawn off, season with celery salt. A little vermicelli boiled in it for fifteen minutes will give it more body-or some of the fancy letters, stars, triangles, etc., that are made particularly for soups can be used, or egg-balls can be made by mixing raw egg with just enough wheat flour or corn starch to make it into round balls, then drop them into the soup and boil for ten minutes. A little milk, a tea-spoon to one egg, is an improvement; also a sprinkle of salt. These balls are sometimes called "noodles." If a richer soup is needed, take slices of raw veal and a little salt pork, and chop very fine with a slice of wheat bread. Season highly with pepper, salt, tomato catsup, and chopped lemon peel, moisten with two well-beaten eggs, and roll into balls as large as a walnut, with floured hands. Fry the balls in butter to a dark brown, and let them cool; turn into the soup and boil about ten minutes. Cut a lemon into very thin bits, slice two hard-boiled eggs, put them into the tureen; add a glass of claret or port wine to them and turn in soup; it is a very "dainty dish."
CLAM SOUP.* First catch your clams-along the ebbing edges Of saline coves you'll find the precious wedges, With backs up, lurking in the sandy bottom; Pull in your iron rake, and lo! you've got 'em!
Take thirty large ones, put a basin under, And cleave, with knife, their stony jaws asunder; Add water (three quarts) to the native liquor, Bring to a boil, (and, by the way, the quicker It boils the better, if you'd do it cutely.) Now add the clams, chopped up and minced minutely.
Allow a longer boil of just three minutes, And while it bubbles, quickly stir within its Tumultuous depths where still the mollusks mutter, Four table-spoons of flour and four of butter, A pint of milk, some pepper to your notion, And clams need salting, although born of ocean.
Remove from fire; (if much boiled they will suffer- You'll find that India-rubber is n't tougher.) After 'tis off, add three fresh eggs, well-beaten, Stir once more, and it's ready to be eaten.
Fruit of the wave! O, dainty and delicious!
Food for the gods! Ambrosia for Apicius!
Worthy to thrill the soul of sea-born Venus, Or titillate the palate of Silenus!
Two things run together here: a set of garnishes for finishing a plain meat stock, and a clam chowder-style soup set out in rhymed couplets. Both are workable, but the verse hides a few instructions that matter.
- The hinge: three minutesThe clams go in for a boil of three minutes and no more, and the pot comes off the heat before the eggs go in. The rhyme about India-rubber is not decoration — clam muscle tightens and turns squeaky within a few minutes of hard cooking, and no amount of further simmering softens it again.
- Thirty large clamsThirty large hard-shell clams; the iron rake and sandy bottom in the verse suit quahogs. Weight in the shell depends heavily on size, so judge by the meat and liquor you get rather than by a fixed figure. Opening them raw over a basin, as directed, saves the liquor; steaming them open in a covered pot with a little water is easier and the liquor can be strained off the same way. Sand settles, so decant rather than pour to the last drop.
- Flour and butter into boiling liquidFour tablespoons of each stirred straight into a bubbling pot will lump. Work them into a paste first (beurre manié) and whisk it in in pieces, or cook a roux separately and thin it with some of the hot broth.
- The finishing eggsThree beaten eggs stirred into the soup off the fire act as a liaison, not a garnish. Temper them with a ladle of the hot liquid first, and keep the pot off the heat afterward — returning it to a boil will scramble them and split the soup.
- Egg-balls and "noodles"Raw egg bound with just enough flour or cornstarch to roll makes a dense dumpling, closer to German Eierklösschen than to noodles. They will absorb liquid as they simmer, so make them small and expect the soup to thicken slightly.
- The forcemeat ballsChopped raw veal, salt pork and bread bound with egg, browned in butter and then simmered ten minutes, is a standard nineteenth-century forcemeat ball in walnut size. A food processor does the fine chopping in seconds; keep the meat cold so the fat does not smear. Ten minutes in simmering soup after browning brings them through.
- Fancy letters and starsThe stamped soup pastas the book calls "fancy letters, stars, triangles" are still sold as pastina, stelline and alphabet pasta. The fifteen minutes given here is longer than modern soup pasta needs; most is done in five to eight.
- Claret in the tureenA "glass" of wine in books of this period is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz. It goes into the tureen with the lemon and sliced egg rather than into the pot, so the wine is not cooked.
- YieldThe clam soup runs to three quarts of water plus the clam liquor and a pint of milk, so figure eight to ten servings as a first course.
"First catch your clams" is a joke on the proverbial cookbook line "first catch your hare," long attributed to Hannah Glasse though it does not appear in her book in that form. Verse recipes like this circulated widely in American newspapers and household magazines, and compilers of subscription cookbooks clipped them freely. The Apicius and Silenus flourishes at the end are typical of the period's appetite for classical name-dropping in the kitchen.