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Friar's Chicken Soup
Cut up three nice plump chickens, or a couple of young fowls. Put them into a saucepan, with some clear stock, if it can be obtained, or two quarts of water. Shred some parsley, and when the chickens are sufficiently cooked, take them up, and keep them hot. Throw in the parsley, simmer a few minutes longer, when stir in the whole of four well-beaten eggs, and remove at once from the fire. Flavour to taste with salt and pepper. Serve with the chicken in the tureen.
A Scots broth thickened with egg rather than flour, and the whole recipe turns on how the egg goes in. The original assumes you know how much chicken, how long, and how hot — it says none of it.
- The hinge: the egg must not scrambleBeat the eggs, then slacken them with a ladleful of the hot broth before they go anywhere near the pan, and have the pan off the heat when you stir them through. Broth above roughly 180F will set the egg into threads instead of thickening it to a smooth, faintly opaque liaison.
- Quantity, and scaling downThree chickens or two young fowls to only two quarts of liquid is a very solid pot rather than a thin soup, and would have fed a large household. For a modern kitchen, treat it as a re-proportioning rather than a straight division: one 3-4 lb chicken jointed, about 1.5 quarts of stock and two eggs gives roughly four servings and behaves the same way, though that is more liquid and more egg per bird than the original.
- "Young fowls"A fowl was an older laying hen, tough and deeply flavoured, needing an hour or more; a "young fowl" is closer to what a supermarket chicken already is. Jointed, a modern bird is done in 30–40 minutes at a bare simmer.
- Water versus stockThe recipe treats stock as a luxury, but with water you are making the broth and the soup in one pot, so keep the simmer gentle and give it the full time. A cut-up bird in plain water will not taste of much in twenty minutes.
- Parsley"Some parsley" is unquantified; a generous handful, chopped fine, is a reasonable reading, and it goes in for only a few minutes so it stays green. Flat-leaf has more flavour, though curled parsley was the commoner sort in British kitchens of the period.
- Skim before the eggLift the fat and scum off the surface while the chicken cooks, or the finished soup will look greasy rather than silky.
- ServingReturn the jointed chicken to the tureen and pour the thickened broth over it. Serve at once; reheating a soup thickened with egg will curdle it, so warm leftovers gently and never let them boil.
History: Friar's Chicken is a Scottish dish of some age, appearing in nineteenth-century Scots cookery writing, including Meg Dods's Cook and Housewife's Manual, usually as chicken simmered in good broth, seasoned with parsley and sometimes a little cinnamon or mace, and finished with beaten egg. The name is traditionally explained by a monastic or ecclesiastical connection, but nothing documents it, and it is best treated as folk etymology. The technique is the clearer point: thickening broth with egg rather than a roux is an old European habit, cousin to Greek avgolemono and to the brouets of medieval cookery, and it persisted in Scots cookery writing. What the recipe shows is the egg liaison in its plainest form -- no wine, no lemon, nothing to distract from the fact that the soup thickens because the egg sets, and only just.