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Chicken Tapioca Soup
The stock for this soup may be made by boiling the bones of a roast fowl with the left-over pieces of meat, and then reducing the liquor to the required strength. Put two table-spoonfuls of tapioca to soak overnight. Add it to the chicken stock, and simmer until the tapioca is quite soft, which will take two to three hours. About half an hour before it is done put one pint of milk, one stalk of celery, one table-spoonful of chopped onion, and a blade of mace, into a saucepan to cook, and as soon as the tapioca becomes soft pour it in. Remove it from the fire, and strain through a wire sieve, rubbing all through with a wooden spoon. Then add salt, pepper, and half a tea-spoonful of butter; set it back on the fire, and heat just to boiling point, when it is ready to serve. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A frugal soup built on the carcass of a roast fowl, thickened with tapioca rather than flour. The one thing to get right is the tapioca: modern granulated or quick-cooking tapioca will be soft in fifteen minutes, not three hours.
- Tapioca, then and nowThe long soak and the two-to-three hour simmer assume large pearl tapioca, which is still sold in Asian groceries. Small pearl, granulated or "quick" tapioca needs no soaking and softens in 10-20 minutes; using it on the original timetable will give you glue.
- Two tablespoonfulsThe recipe does not say how much stock to use; with the pint of milk added, two tablespoons of dry tapioca gives a lightly bodied soup. It thickens noticeably as it cools, so judge consistency hot and thin with more stock if needed.
- The stockThe recipe does not say how long to boil the bones or how much liquor to end up with; bones and scraps from one roast chicken, covered with water and simmered, then reduced, will give roughly a quart or so of usable stock. Skim the fat before the milk goes in.
- Blade of maceA blade is a single dried piece of the aril from around the nutmeg, not ground mace. If you only have ground, use a small pinch, and remember it will not strain out.
- Adding the milkCook the pint of milk with celery, onion and mace gently and separately, as written. Milk held over direct heat scorches and will curdle if boiled hard alongside a salty reduced stock; infuse it just below a simmer.
- SievingPushing the whole thing through a wire sieve with a wooden spoon is the period equivalent of a blender. A stick blender followed by a single pass through a fine sieve gets the same smooth, slightly grainy body faster.
- Final heatingThe recipe says to heat it just to boiling point once the milk is in; take it no further. Salt and pepper at this stage, since reduced stock can already be salty.
- Yield and costProbably serves four to six as a first course. The 'probable cost, 1s. 6d.' is a Victorian household price for the whole potful, quoted so a cook could budget a menu.
Tapioca, the starch extracted from cassava root, was imported into British kitchens through colonial trade and by the nineteenth century was valued for exactly what this recipe asks of it: a bland, digestible thickener that gives a soup body without the pastiness of flour. The dish is a piece of household economy - a roast fowl was expected to yield a second meal from its bones, and the addition of milk, celery and a blade of mace turns thin second-day stock into something that could be sent to table. Smooth, mildly spiced soups of this kind were also commonly recommended for invalids and children in the period, which may account for the gentle seasoning and the insistence on rubbing everything through a sieve.