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Chicken Soup, Delicate
Pluck and wash thoroughly three young chickens, and put them in a stewpan with five pints of good, white, nicely-flavoured stock, thoroughly freed from fat and cleared from sediment. A sliced turnip and carrot may be put with them, and removed before the soup is thickened. Let them simmer gently for nearly an hour. Remove all the white flesh, and return the rest of the birds to the soup, and simmer once more for a couple of hours. Pour a little of the boiling liquid over a quarter of a pound of the crumb of bread, and when it is well soaked, drain it, put it in a mortar with the flesh which has been taken from the bones, and pound it to a smooth paste, adding, by degrees, the liquid. Flavour with salt, cayenne, and a very little pounded mace, press the mixture through a sieve, and boil once more, adding one pint of boiling cream. If the soup should not be sufficiently thick, a table-spoonful of arrowroot which has been mixed may be added very smoothly with a little cold milk. Probable cost, chickens, 2s. 6d. each. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A Victorian white chicken soup of the potage à la reine type, thickened with pounded breast meat and bread rather than flour. The whole point is a smooth, pale purée, so the sieving stage is not optional.
- The hinge: pound and sieve properlyAny fibre left in the breast paste will read as grittiness in the finished soup. A food processor or blender does the mortar's work in seconds, but still pass the purée through a fine sieve or chinois afterwards.
- Quantities in modern measureFive imperial pints is about 2.8 litres of stock; a quarter pound of breadcrumb is 115 g of soft interior crumb, crusts removed; one pint of cream is just under 600 ml. The book's British pint is 20 fl oz, so adjust if you are working from US measures.
- "Three young chickens"These are smaller birds than modern roasters, though the recipe gives no weight. Two modern chickens will give you roughly the meat and bone required, though the flesh will be firmer and the flavour stronger.
- PluckingSkip it. The instruction dates from an era when poultry arrived feathered; buy birds dressed and check for stray pinfeathers along the wings.
- Cooking timesSimmer the whole birds 45 minutes to an hour, no longer, then strip the breast at once — that meat is going into the purée and overcooking makes it stringy. The carcasses and dark meat can then go back for the further two hours, which is really stock-making rather than cooking meat.
- Mace, and the creamGround mace stales quickly and turns dusty; a scant quarter teaspoon of fresh is enough for this volume. Add the cream scalded, off a rolling boil, and do not let the finished soup boil hard afterwards or it may separate.
- Arrowroot as insuranceSlake a tablespoon in a little cold milk and add it in a thin stream to the simmering soup, then give it a minute to clear. Arrowroot thickens at a lower temperature than flour and thins again if held at a boil, so finish and serve.
- YieldAs stated, six to eight — but as a first course, not a main. Reckon roughly 300 ml a head.
Soups of this kind descend from the French potage à la reine, a white chicken soup thickened with pounded almonds or breast meat that appears in English cookery books from the seventeenth century onwards and is, by tradition, generally traced to the court cooking of the Valois period. It demonstrates a whole technique: liaison by pounded solids and cream rather than by roux, the method behind the family of purées and crèmes that dominated genteel Victorian and Edwardian menus. The cost note — half a crown a chicken — is a reminder that this was not everyday food; nor was the labour, since the pounding and sieving of three birds' breast meat in a mortar was the step a blender has since made trivial.