Chicken Soup
In boiling chickens for salads, etc., the broth (water in which they are boiled) may be used for soup. When the chickens are to be served whole, stuff and tie in a cloth. To the broth add a dozen tomatoes (or a quart can), and one thinly-sliced onion; boil twenty minutes, season with salt and pepper, add two well-beaten eggs, and serve.-Mrs. Smythe, New York City.
A thrift recipe built on the water left from poaching chickens for salad. Two things carry it: a broth with enough body to be worth eating, and eggs added off the boil so they set in fine threads rather than lumps.
- The hinge: the eggsBeat the eggs, pull the pot off direct heat so the surface stops rolling, then pour them in a thin stream while stirring. At a full boil they seize into rags; just under a simmer they set into soft threads through the soup.
- Start with a real brothWater that has simply covered a chicken will be thin. Poach the bird with a halved onion, a carrot, celery, a few peppercorns and a bay leaf, and salt the water lightly, or the finished soup will taste of tomato and little else.
- A dozen tomatoesA dozen mid-size tomatoes comes to roughly 3 lb, near enough to the quart can the recipe offers as an alternative (a 28-32 oz can of whole or crushed tomatoes). Peel fresh ones if you want a smooth broth; twenty minutes' boiling will loosen the skins rather than dissolve them.
- Twenty minutes is for the tomatoesThat timing is only long enough to break down the fruit and marry it with the broth. It assumes the chicken is already fully cooked and lifted out.
- Stuff and tie in a clothThe cloth keeps a stuffed bird intact while it poaches and keeps stuffing out of the broth. Cheesecloth or a clean muslin square tied at the ends does the job; the chicken is served separately, not in the soup.
- SeasoningCanned tomatoes are acidic and will need more salt than expected, plus a pinch of sugar if the soup tastes sharp. Season after the tomatoes have cooked down, since reduction concentrates what is already there.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many chickens or what size. Reckoning on the broth from one 4-5 lb bird plus a quart of tomatoes, expect roughly 2 quarts, or six to eight first-course servings. Strain the broth of fat and scraps before adding the tomatoes if you want it clear.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) was assembled from contributions by Ohio housewives and their correspondents, and its economy is structural rather than sentimental: a chicken bought for salad also had to yield a soup, and the book says so outright in the first line. Tomatoes appearing here in a quart can is worth noting — commercial canning expanded rapidly in the United States after the Civil War, and by the late 1870s canned tomatoes were among the few vegetables a Northern household could count on out of season. The recipe itself is credited to New York City. Finishing a clear soup with beaten egg is an older and very widespread technique, found from Roman broths through Italian stracciatella to the egg-drop soups of China; here it adds protein and a little richness to a broth that had already given its best to another dish.