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RICE AND EGG SOUP (a Danish recipe)
Make a bouillon, and strain it; set it again on the fire with a quarter of a pound of scalded rice; let it boil till quite tender, then beat up the yolks of four or six eggs, and stir them in. The soup must not boil after the eggs are added. Send to table with toasted bread.
A simple egg-thickened broth of the kind found across northern Europe. The whole recipe hinges on one line: the soup must not boil once the yolks go in.
- The hinge — tempering the yolksBeat the yolks in a bowl, then ladle in a cup of the hot broth in a thin stream while whisking before returning the mixture to the pan. Off the heat, or over the lowest flame, the soup will thicken to a light coating consistency; a simmer will scramble it into threads.
- BouillonHere simply a plain meat broth, strained as the recipe directs. A good unsalted stock stands in for it; season at the end.
- Quarter of a pound of riceAbout 115 g, a generous half to two-thirds of a cup uncooked, which is a lot for a soup and will swell to fill it. Long-grain gives a clearer broth, round-grain a thicker one.
- "Scalded rice"Pouring boiling water over the rice and draining it, which rinses off surface starch. Modern packaged rice needs no more than a rinse in cold water, if that.
- Cooking timeRice simmered in broth is tender in 18-25 minutes depending on type. "Till quite tender" leaves it to the cook; stop while the grains still hold their shape.
- Four or six yolksThe recipe gives no quantity of broth, so scale by eye: four yolks give a light body, six something close to a thin custard. Use the smaller number unless you want it rich.
- Egg safetyThe yolks are cooked only by residual heat, so the soup finishes below a hard-set temperature. Use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone who should avoid lightly cooked egg.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no liquid quantity, so yield depends on how much bouillon you make. The toasted bread is sent to table separately.
Egg-thickened broths are among the oldest thickening techniques in European cookery, predating flour-based liaisons, and they survive in forms as far apart as Greek avgolemono, Italian stracciatella and the Scandinavian egg soups of which this is one. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery gathers such dishes under national labels, though how much the "Danish" tag here reflects any particular Danish original is unclear. What is genuinely northern about it is the plainness: no lemon, no wine, no spice, only broth, rice, yolks and toast. The warning that the soup must not boil is the one piece of technique the entry bothers to spell out, which suggests the compilers expected cooks to have ruined it at least once.