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Chicken Cream Soup
Boil and old fowl, with an onion, in 4 quarts of cold water until reduced to half the original quantity. Take out the fowl and let it get cold. Cut off the whole of the breast and chop very fine. Mix with the pounded yolks of 2 hard-boiled eggs, and rub through a colander. Cool, skim, and strain the soup into a soup-pot. Season, add the chicken and egg mixture, simmer ten minutes, and pour into the tureen. Then add a small cup of boiling milk.
A clear chicken broth thickened not with flour or cream but with pounded breast meat and hard-boiled egg yolk — an older style of "cream" soup that predates the roux-based versions. The work is in the reduction and the straining.
- An old fowlThis means a stewing hen or spent laying bird, tougher and far more flavourful than a broiler. Supermarkets rarely stock them; a 4–5 lb roasting chicken works, though you will get less gelatine and a thinner body. Halal and Asian markets often sell true stewing hens.
- The reductionFour quarts of cold water down to two is the whole point — that is roughly 2½ to 3½ hours at a bare simmer, longer for a genuine old bird. Keep it below a rolling boil or the broth clouds.
- Cool, skim, strainChilling the broth lets the fat set into a cap you can lift off cleanly. This step is what separates a clear soup from a greasy one, and it cannot be rushed with a spoon while hot.
- Rubbing through a colanderA period colander was a perforated tin bowl used as a coarse sieve. Use a fine-mesh sieve, or pulse the chopped breast and yolks in a food processor with a ladle of hot broth to loosen the paste before pushing it through.
- Seasoning is left to youThe original says only "season." Salt generously — a reduced unsalted broth tastes flat — plus white pepper, and a scrape of nutmeg or blade of mace if you want the period flavour.
- The final milkAdd the boiling milk off the heat, in the tureen, as written. Reheating or boiling the soup once the milk is in risks curdling in a heavily reduced, well-salted broth. A "small cup" is not a fixed measure; something in the region of 6 fl oz is a reasonable reading.
- YieldRoughly two quarts, or six to eight first-course servings. The legs and thighs of the fowl are not used here and are worth keeping for hash, croquettes or salad.