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Rice Soup, Royal
Put two fowls with a large knuckle of veal into a stock-pot; fill it with beef stock, skim it, and add a carrot, a turnip, an onion, half a head of celery, and two leeks; boil for five hours, take off all the fat carefully, and strain the consomme through a napkin; put half of it into a middle-sized stewpan with six ounces of Carolina rice washed and blanched, simmer it for two hours, then break it with a wooden spoon, and add the rest of the consomme; whilst boiling, and at the time of serving, put a spoonful into a puree of fowl, prepared in the usual manner, then recommence this operation twice, pour the puree thus made thin into the tureen, and on it the remainder of the rice by degrees, that it may be well mingled, for if you pour the rice in quickly, you run the risk of decomposing or curdling the puree of fowl, which ought to be rendered smooth in mingling the soup.
This is a two-part construction: a very long-cooked chicken and veal consommé, half of which is cooked down with rice until it collapses into a thickener, the whole then married to a purée of fowl. The hinge is the last sentence — the rice mixture goes into the purée slowly, or the soup breaks.
- Temper, do not dumpThe purée of fowl is a protein-rich liaison and will curdle if hit with boiling liquid all at once. Add a spoonful of the hot rice soup, stir smooth, repeat twice, then add the rest by degrees off a hard boil.
- "Two fowls"A fowl meant a mature laying hen, tougher and far more flavourful than a supermarket bird, which is why five hours was reasonable. Two 4–5 lb chickens work; if you can find stewing hens, use them, and expect the meat to be usable for the purée rather than for eating on its own.
- Knuckle of vealThe knuckle is the shin end with its joint — bought today as veal shank or veal knuckle bone. It is there for gelatin, which gives the consommé body; a beef shank bone is the nearest substitute if veal is unavailable.
- Carolina riceA long-grain white rice from the American Southeast, the standard fine rice of Victorian kitchens. Any long-grain white rice stands in. "Blanched" here means a brief boil in water and a rinse to wash off surface starch and any dustiness.
- Two hours for the riceAbsurd for rice served as rice, and deliberate here: the grains are meant to disintegrate so the wooden spoon can break them into a smooth, starchy thickening base. Use a heavy pan, keep the heat very low and stir, or the bottom will scorch.
- Purée of fowl, "in the usual manner"Puree of fowl, "in the usual manner" -- generally cooked white meat pounded to a paste and worked through a sieve, loosened with a little consomme and sometimes cream or a white sauce. A food processor does the pounding; still pass it through a fine sieve for the texture the recipe assumes.
- Straining through a napkinA clean linen or double muslin cloth in a colander, rinsed and wrung out first so it does not absorb fat. Chilling the strained stock overnight lifts the last of the fat off as a solid cap far more reliably than skimming hot.
- SeasoningNo salt is specified anywhere in the recipe. Season only at the end, after the rice has thickened and concentrated the liquid.
- YieldThe recipe gives no volumes: the pot is simply filled with beef stock to cover two birds and a veal knuckle, so the output depends entirely on the pot. It is plainly a large-party quantity; scale down for a domestic batch.
In Victorian soup names "royal" is used loosely, and a la royale more usually denotes a garnish of moulded savoury custard rather than a puree; this one sits with the chicken puree soups -- the French potages a la reine -- that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cooks treated as the pinnacle of refined white soups. This entry has the fingerprints of the grand kitchen rather than the family one: two whole birds and a veal knuckle spent purely on flavour, a five-hour extraction, straining through a napkin, and a final assembly whose only real difficulty is emulsion. Cassell's, compiling for a broad middle-class readership in the later nineteenth century, sat these ambitious set pieces beside far plainer fare. The Carolina rice specified is itself a period marker: before the American rice industry shifted west, Carolina long-grain was the benchmark grade in British kitchens and appears by name throughout the cookery books of the era.