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Chicken Soup Quickly Made
Cut the meat of half a chicken in small pieces. Slice a small onion, put it in a saucepan with a tablespoonful of butter, when hot add the chicken and fry together for ten or fifteen minutes, turning the chicken around often until well browned. Add 3 pints of consomme or good, clean, white stock, 3 tablespoonfuls of well-washed rice, a dash of cayenne, a teaspoonful of minced parsley, and salt as needed. Boil all together twenty minutes and serve.
A stovetop soup that leans entirely on the quality of the stock, since there is no long simmer to build flavour. Twenty minutes of boiling is just enough for the rice, so everything else must be ready to go in at once.
- Half a chickenRoughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb of meat off the bone. Boneless thigh works better than breast here, since it stays moist through both the frying and the boiling.
- 3 pintsSix cups if the measure is American; three imperial pints would be 7 1/2 cups. Which is intended depends on where the book was printed, and the recipe itself does not say.
- The stock is the recipeWith no bones and no long extraction, the finished soup tastes like whatever you pour in. Use a good unsalted chicken stock and salt at the end, after the rice has absorbed some liquid.
- Brown properlyTen to fifteen minutes in butter is meant to colour the meat, not merely cook it. Note that the recipe asks for the pieces to be turned often rather than left to sit for a crust.
- Rice and timingThree tablespoons of white rice in six cups of liquid is a light garnish, not a thickener, and twenty minutes at a low boil will cook it through. Brown rice will not be done in that time.
- Cayenne and parsleyA dash of cayenne means about 1/8 teaspoon. Add the parsley in the last two or three minutes rather than at the start, so it keeps its colour.
- YieldSix cups of liquid plus meat and rice serves four generously as a first course, three as a light main.