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Egg Soup
Pound eight hard-boiled eggs in a mortar, with two table-spoonfuls of white sauce. When reduced to a soft paste, add gradually a quart of milk, season to taste, and put it on the fire to boil. Then rub it through a tamis or fine sieve with the aid of a wooden spoon. Mix four yolks of eggs with half a pint of cream, and add to the soup, bringing it again nearly but not quite to boiling point. Serve with bread croutons. Probable cost, 2s.
A Victorian potage of hard-boiled eggs sieved into milk and finished with a yolk-and-cream liaison. The whole thing turns on the final step: once the yolks go in, the soup must never boil.
- The hinge: the liaisonYolks and cream added to hot soup thicken it at around 175-180F and scramble above about 185F. Temper the yolk-cream mixture with a ladle of the hot soup first, return it to the pan off the heat, then warm gently, stirring, until it coats the spoon. "Nearly but not quite to boiling point" is not a figure of speech.
- Imperial measuresThe book's quart is the imperial quart, 40 fl oz, so about 5 US cups of milk; the half pint of cream is 10 fl oz, or 1 1/4 US cups. Rounding to 4 cups milk and 1 cup cream gives a slightly richer soup and no harm done.
- White sauceHere this is most likely a plain béchamel — butter and flour cooked together, let down with milk and simmered until it loses any raw flour taste; some Victorian white sauces were built on stock rather than milk. Two tablespoons is only a binder for the egg paste, not the thickening of the soup, which comes from the sieved eggs and the final liaison.
- Mortar and tamisA tamis is a fine straining sieve or cloth. A food processor will reduce the eggs and sauce to a paste in seconds, but still pass the thinned mixture through a fine sieve afterwards — bits of coagulated white will not break down and give the soup a grainy body.
- Cook the eggs gentlyEggs boiled hard and fast give a grey-green ring at the yolk and a sulphurous edge that a mild milk soup will show up. Twelve minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water.
- SeasoningTake 'season to taste' as salt and white pepper, perhaps a scrape of nutmeg or mace; white pepper avoids speckling a pale soup. It needs more salt than you expect; eggs and milk are both flat without it.
- Yield and servingRoughly 1 1/2 quarts, serving six as a first course. Croutons should be small dice fried in butter and added at the table, not in the tureen, or they go to pulp.
- CostThe recipe puts the whole tureen at two shillings.
This belongs among the plain white soups of the late-Victorian repertoire, the family that includes almond, artichoke and rice soups: no meat stock, a pale body, and a finish of yolks and cream. The technique is straight from French practice, where a soup thickened at the last moment with yolks beaten into cream is lié à l'anglaise, and the instruction to bring it near but not to the boil is the standard warning that goes with it. Soups of this sort earned their keep in a large household because they used what the kitchen always had \ eand because they could be served on days when meat was avoided. The mortar and tamis made light work of the pounding and sieving that the recipe assumes without comment; the same steps are the only laborious part of the dish for a cook without them.