Home › The Principles of Cookery › POTAGE (a la Reine)
POTAGE (a la Reine)
This is a delicate white soup, said to have been a great favourite with her late Majesty Queen Victoria. Skin and wash carefully three young chickens or two large fowls, and boil them in five pints of good nicely-flavoured veal stock for about an hour. Lift them out, pick off all the white meat, put the bodies of the birds again into the stewpan, and let them simmer an hour and a half longer. Season the broth with salt and cayenne, and when it is sufficiently simmered pour it out, let it cool, and thoroughly take off the fat which rises to the surface. Pound the white flesh of the birds to a perfectly smooth paste, and with it a tea-cupful of finely-grated bread-crumbs. Mix gradually with this paste a small quantity of the boiling stock, and press it through a fine hair-sieve. Add the rest of the stock, and stir the whole over a gentle fire in a clean saucepan until it boils. Add from a pint to a pint and a half of boiling cream. Serve very hot. If liked, the cream may be slightly flavoured with almonds. If veal broth is not at hand, a little may be made as follows. Buy a knuckle of veal from which nearly all the meat has been cut off. Break it into small pieces, and put them into a stewpan with half a pound of lean ham cut up small-or a ham bone-a small carrot, a small onion, a head of celery, a large blade of mace, a bunch of parsley, and a dozen white peppercorns. Pour over these a gallon of cold water. Bring the liquid slowly to the boil, skim very carefully, then draw the pan to the side and let the contents simmer for six or seven hours until the stock is reduced to five pints. Pour the soup out, and leave it until the next day. Take the fat from the top, and pour off the soup without the settlings. Boil the fowls in this stock. If the soup is not sufficiently thick, it may be made so with a little arrowroot or ground rice. Time, about four hours. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. per pint, exclusive of the veal stock. Sufficient for twelve persons.
A classical white chicken soup that depends entirely on texture: pounded breast meat, crumb, stock and cream taken through a sieve until nothing grains on the tongue. The method is sound, but the equipment and the cream quantity want rethinking.
- The hinge: never boil after the cream goes inThe soup is brought to the boil once, before enrichment. Once the cream is added it needs only to be hot enough to serve, or the purée will separate and the surface will turn granular. Heat the cream separately and stir it in off a fierce flame.
- Pounding, without a mortarA food processor does in two minutes what the original expects of a pestle, but the sieving is not optional even so. Push the paste through a fine sieve with a ladle or use a drum sieve; chicken breast has fibres that no blender fully breaks down.
- Fowls and chickens"Two large fowls" means mature boiling hens rather than young birds, which is why the carcasses are put back for a further hour and a half after the white meat is picked off. Supermarket roasting chickens are younger and softer: an hour in the stock, then take off the breast meat and give the carcasses the further simmer as written.
- A teacupful, and other vesselsA Victorian teacupful is usually reckoned at 5 to 6 fl oz, so a scant US cup of fine dry crumbs. The pints are imperial, 20 fl oz each: five imperial pints of stock is about 3 quarts US, and a gallon of water at the start is about 4.8 US quarts.
- Scale the cream backA pint to a pint and a half of cream into five pints of stock is a Victorian proportion for a rich course served in small quantity. A cup to a cup and a half gives a soup most people will finish, and you can always add more.
- Veal stock and the knuckleA knuckle of veal is the shank; ask a butcher for sawn veal shank or veal marrow bones, which are usually a special order. Veal gives the pale colour and the body from gelatine, so if you substitute, use a light chicken stock with a split pig's trotter rather than anything browned or beef-based.
- The almond flavouringThis probably means a very small amount of almond essence or a few sweet almonds infused in the hot cream; use sweet almonds or extract rather than bitter almonds. Two or three drops of extract in the whole quantity is the outside limit; more turns a savoury soup into blancmange.
- ThickeningIf it needs body, slake the arrowroot or ground rice in cold stock and stir it into the simmering soup before the cream. Arrowroot thins again if held at a boil, so add it late and take the pan off the heat as soon as it clears.
- Timing and yieldThe book's four hours is total cooking time, not active work; the stock is best made the day before so the fat lifts off in a solid sheet. Twelve servings as the book has it; count on eight modern bowls.
Potage à la reine is an old named soup in French cookery, a white pottage of pounded chicken thickened with bread and almonds, related to the medieval brouet blanc and its kin; it is traditionally traced in name to a French queen, most often Marguerite de Valois or Anne of Austria, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented and the various stories contradict each other. Here the royal association is attached instead to Queen Victoria - the phrase "her late Majesty" places this text after her death in 1901 - though why the compiler chose her is guesswork. A smooth pur"e soup was in any case a mark of a well-staffed kitchen: hours of pounding in a mortar and forcing through hair sieves, all so that a diner would notice nothing at all.