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Almond Soup
Take one quart of white stock (see Stock) made either from bones which have been soaked for a few minutes in salt and water to whiten them, or, if preferred, from fresh meat. Boil the liquor with a small piece of mace, five or six cloves, and a piece of stale bread. Take out the spice, and rub the soup through a sieve. Blanch and pound six ounces of sweet almonds with the hard-boiled yolk of an egg. Add the paste smoothly and slowly to the stock when it is cool. Boil it again, and just before serving the soup add a tea-cupful of milk or cream. Probable cost, if made from bones and with milk, 1s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A white almond soup of the old school, thickened with pounded nuts and stale bread rather than flour. Almost all of it translates directly; the few points below are where a modern cook can go wrong.
- The hinge: never boil it after the almonds go inThe hinge: keep the heat gentle once the almonds go in -- The recipe says to boil again after adding the almond paste, and only then to add the milk or cream just before serving. A hard boil with the nut paste in suspension will make the soup separate, and any dairy added over high heat can split. Bring it just to a bare simmer to cook out the raw almond taste, then add the dairy off the heat and serve.
- Quantities in modern termsAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, about 5 cups. A tea-cupful in Victorian cookery books is roughly 5 fl oz, so a generous half cup of milk or cream. Six ounces of almonds is about 1 1/4 cups of whole blanched nuts.
- Sweet almondsThe word "sweet" is there to distinguish them from bitter almonds, then sold for flavouring and now largely unavailable because of their cyanide-releasing compounds. Ordinary supermarket almonds are sweet almonds; buy them whole rather than pre-ground, since ground almonds stale quickly and lose much of their flavour.
- Blanching and poundingPour boiling water over the almonds, stand two minutes, and the skins slip off between finger and thumb. A food processor replaces the mortar, but grind with the hard-boiled yolk and a ladle of the cooled stock so the nuts emulsify rather than turning to oily meal.
- Whitening the bonesThe brief soak in salted water draws out blood so the stock stays pale. Veal and chicken bones give the intended colour; beef or roasted bones will make a brown soup and defeat the point of the dish.
- The bread is the thickenerA piece of stale bread simmered in the stock and then sieved gives the body that a modern cook would get from a roux or cream. Use a plain white crumb, crusts off, roughly a thick slice, and let it fall apart before you sieve.
- SievingRub the soup through a fine sieve as instructed, and again after the almonds are in if you want it truly smooth. Almond solids settle, so stir it in the tureen before ladling.
- Mace and clovesWhole blade mace is worth seeking out; a pinch of ground mace stirred in and left is not the same thing, and cannot be lifted out as the recipe requires. Five or six cloves in 5 cups is assertive by current taste, so start with three.
- Yield and servingFive or six as a first course, as stated. Serve it hot in warmed cups or shallow plates, with croutons fried in butter if you want texture against a soup that is otherwise entirely smooth.
Almond soups belong to a very long European tradition of cooking with pounded nuts, which supplied richness and body in fast-day and Lenten cookery when milk and cream were forbidden; almond milk appears constantly in medieval and early modern kitchen manuscripts for exactly that reason. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the almond had migrated into the family of genteel "white soups" served at the start of a formal dinner, the best known being soupe a la reine, in which pounded almonds and a light veal or chicken stock are finished with cream. The method here is a straightforward exercise in that technique: whitened bones for a pale stock, bread as the thickener, a sieve doing the work of a blender, and a hard-boiled yolk to help the ground nuts hold in suspension. The costing at one shilling for five or six people is a reminder of what such a book was for, since the price note tells a careful housekeeper whether the dish was within reach that week.