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WHITE SOUP (another way) (Take three pints of good white)
Take three pints of good white stock entirely free from fat and sediment, put it into a stewpan, and let it heat gently. Blanch two ounces of sweet almonds, and pound them to a paste in a marble mortar with a little water to keep them from oiling. Mince and pound with them a slice of dressed veal or fowl, and add a table-spoonful of stale bread-crumbs and a small blade of mace, finely powdered. When the mixture is smooth, stir it very gradually into a pint of cream, and add a pint of the stock; put into it an inch of thin lemon-rind, and simmer over the fire for a few minutes. Stir into it as much of the stock as will make it of the thickness of cream, and simmer the soup gently for half an hour. Remove the lemon-rind, and serve the soup with toasted sippets. If liked, arrowroot, ground rice, or common flour may be used instead of the almonds; and, when cream cannot be had, new milk mixed with the yolks of eggs may be used instead. The eggs should be beaten in the soup tureen; they should be mixed with a table-spoonful of the milk, the rest of the milk (boiling) should be added gradually, and the soup poured in. By increasing the quantities and preserving the proportions, a large quantity of soup may be made. Time to simmer the thickening in the soup, half an hour. Sufficient for eight or nine persons.
A Victorian white soup thickened with pounded almonds and enriched with cream — closer to a medieval blanc-manger than to a modern cream soup. Most of the work is in the pounding, which a food processor handles in seconds.
- The hinge: keep the almonds from oilingPounded almonds release oil the moment they overheat or are worked dry, and an oiled paste will streak the finished soup. Add water a teaspoon at a time in the processor, and pulse rather than run it continuously.
- White stockA pale stock from veal bones or fowl, with no browning and no coloured vegetables. A good unsalted chicken stock, thoroughly skimmed and strained through muslin, is the practical equivalent. "Free from sediment" matters here — nothing hides in a white soup.
- Dressed veal or fowl"Dressed" means cooked. A slice of poached chicken breast or leftover roast veal is what is wanted; the recipe gives no weight, and it is there for body and savour, not bulk.
- Quantities and yieldThree pints of stock plus a pint of cream, in imperial measure, is roughly 1.7 litres of stock and 570 ml of cream. Note that not all the stock goes in at once — a pint joins the almond mixture, the rest is added to thin the soup to the consistency of pouring cream. Serves eight or nine as a first course.
- New milkSimply fresh whole milk, as opposed to skimmed or soured. Use whole milk for the egg-yolk variant.
- The egg-yolk variantBeating yolks in the tureen and pouring boiling milk and soup over them is a classic liaison, but it will not reliably take the eggs to a safe temperature. If you use raw yolks this way, use pasteurised eggs, or thicken over low heat in the pan to 175F instead — at which point stop, because it will curdle above that.
- Mace and lemon rindA blade of mace is a piece of the dried nutmeg covering; about a quarter teaspoon of ground mace stands in. Take only the yellow zest in a single strip so it lifts out cleanly, and do not leave it in beyond the stated time or the soup turns bitter.
- The half hour of simmeringThis is a genuine requirement, not caution: the bread and almonds need it to lose their rawness and swell. Keep it at a bare tremble — cream soup at a rolling boil will separate.
- Starch substitutionsThe alternatives are given without quantities. As a rough guide, allow around 1 1/2 oz of flour or ground rice, or about 1 oz of arrowroot, for this volume of liquid; arrowroot should go in slaked with cold liquid at the end and not be boiled hard, or it thins again.
- SippetsSmall triangles or dice of bread, toasted or fried crisp, handed separately so they do not go soft in the tureen.
White soup was one of the fixed points of the English formal dinner and, more famously, of the ball supper — the soup Mr Bingley's housekeeper Nicholls must make "enough" of before he will send round his cards in Pride and Prejudice. Its ancestry is older than the Regency: thickening a pale broth with pounded almonds and setting it off with mace and lemon peel descends from the medieval and early modern blanc-manger and the French potage à la reine, dishes in which whiteness itself was the luxury and the almond stood in for dairy on fast days. By the time Cassell's compiled this entry in the later nineteenth century the almonds had become optional, and the string of substitutions at the end — arrowroot, ground rice, common flour, milk and egg yolks for cream — is the book's usual habit of showing a genteel dish and then quietly explaining how a household without a marble mortar or a dairy could still put it on the table.