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WHITE SOUP (a la Reine)
Roast a fowl, pick the flesh from the bones, free it from skin and sinew, mince a pound of it to a smooth paste, moistening with a quarter of a pint of stock and a slice of fresh butter. Have ready three-quarters of a pound of Carolina rice which has been boiled gently till tender in three pints of white stock. Put it into the mortar, and pound it with the other ingredients. Put the pulp into a stewpan, moisten with two pints of white stock, and rub it through a fine sieve. Heat it again in the stewpan, and when it is quite hot season with pepper and salt, stir into it half a pint of boiling cream, and serve immediately. The stock for this soup may be made by stewing the bones and trimmings of the fowl with a slice of lean veal, a large carrot, a few sticks of celery, and an onion. If liked, a dessert-spoonful of gelatine may be substituted for the veal. Time, altogether, three to four hours. Probable cost, 5s. 10d. for this quantity, supposing the fowl to cost 3s. 6d. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A Victorian velvet soup built on pounded roast fowl and rice rather than flour. The whole point is texture, so the sieving is not optional.
- The mortar is a blenderWhere the original pounds cooked chicken and rice to a paste, a food processor or upright blender does the same work in a minute or two. Blend the meat and rice with enough of the stock to keep the blades moving, then still pass the purée through a fine sieve or chinois s between smooth and gritty.
- Imperial measuresThese are imperial pints of 20 fl oz, so two pints is about 1.2 litres and half a pint of cream is roughly 285 ml. A quarter-pint of stock for moistening the meat is about 150 ml.
- Carolina riceA long-grain white rice, historically from the South Carolina lowcountry and prized for cooking up dry and separate. Any decent long-grain white rice works; do not use basmati, whose perfume fights the delicate fowl, and avoid parboiled rice, which will not break down.
- White stockStock made from unroasted bones and vegetables, kept pale — no browning, no tomato, no dark herbs. If you buy it, choose a light chicken stock and skim it well; a dark stock turns the soup a muddy beige and defeats the name.
- The gelatine substitutionThe gelatine substitution — The slice of lean veal is there largely for body, though it also lends a mild savour. A dessertspoonful of powdered gelatine (roughly a sachet's worth, 7–10 g) bloomed in cold water and stirred into the hot stock gives a similar mouthfeel, though a stock made with a chicken foot or a split wing tip does it better.
- Cream at the endAdd the hot cream off a hard boil and serve at once. Rice-thickened soups thicken further as they stand and will catch on the pan base if held over direct heat; if it must wait, keep it over a pan of hot water and loosen with more stock.
- Consistency and seasoningAim for something that coats a spoon but still pours. White pepper rather than black keeps the colour clean, and the soup takes more salt than you expect once the cream is in.
- Yield and timingSix to eight as a first course, and the stated three to four hours is realistic if you are roasting the fowl and making stock from its carcass on the same day. The cost note — 3s 6d for a chicken — is a useful reminder that poultry was once the expensive part of the dish.
Potage à la reine — "the queen's soup" — is a name attached in French cookery to a family of pale, rich, almond- or poultry-thickened soups, and it is traditionally said to honour Marguerite de Valois or Marie de Médicis, though the attribution is repeated far more often than it is documented. In England the same idea travelled under the plainer name of white soup, a standing fixture of supper tables at balls and assemblies; Bingley's promise in Pride and Prejudice that he will hold his ball as soon as Nicholls has made white soup enough is the best-known reference to it. Earlier English versions leaned on pounded almonds and hard-boiled egg yolks for the whiteness and body; by the time Cassell's compilers set this one down, some time in the 1870s or 1880s, the thickening has shifted to rice and pounded flesh picked from the bones, which is cheaper, more reliably smooth, and a fair index of how much labour a Victorian kitchen with a marble mortar and a tammy cloth could still be expected to supply.