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Chicken Soup with Leeks and Onions
Cut some nice slices from a chicken and brown them in a saucepan with a tablespoonful of butter and a sliced onion. Pour over them three pints of chicken consomme, add 3 leeks sliced, a sprig of parsley, and 2 or 3 celery tops. Season with salt and pepper, and half a blade of mace. Boil half an hour, remove the parsley, celery top, and mace, and serve with sippets of fried bread.
A clear soup built on ready-made stock, so its quality lives or dies on the consomme. The only real pitfall is the word "boil" — hold it at a bare simmer or the chicken slices turn stringy and the broth clouds.
- Simmer, don't boilA rolling boil for half an hour will shred the browned chicken and emulsify fat into the broth, leaving it grey and murky. Keep it at a lazy simmer with the surface barely trembling, and skim once or twice.
- Three pintsSix US cups, or about 1.4 litres. If the book is following British measure, three imperial pints is closer to 7 cups (1.7 litres); either amount works, the larger simply gives a thinner soup.
- Chicken consommeA clarified, well-reduced chicken stock. Good unsalted commercial stock is a reasonable stand-in, but taste before seasoning — most is already salted, and mace and leek need room to show.
- Half a blade of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold as whole "blades" or ground. Half a blade is a very light touch; if using ground, a pinch of no more than an eighth of a teaspoon, and skip the instruction to fish it out.
- The chicken slicesBoneless thigh or breast cut into thin slices across the grain, browned properly in the butter so the fond flavours the soup. Thigh holds up far better over thirty minutes than breast, which will be dry at the edges.
- LeeksThree leeks means the white and pale green only, split lengthwise and rinsed hard — grit sits deep between the layers and will not simmer out.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread fried in butter until crisp. Cut them thin, fry just before serving, and pass them separately so they do not go soft in the bowl.
- YieldServes four to six as a first course, three as a light main with bread.
Soups of this kind sit at the junction of two traditions: the French clear soup, which demanded a properly clarified consomme as its foundation, and the older English pottage of leeks, onions and whatever bird was to hand. The leek-and-onion combination is far older than the consomme; leeks were a staple of the northern European kitchen garden long before stock was thought of as a separate manufactured article. That this recipe assumes a quantity of chicken consomme already on hand tells you it was written for a kitchen with stock in reserve. The sippets of fried bread are a survival too: "sippet" is generally taken to be a diminutive of "sop," and small fried croutons were served with clear soup long before anyone called them croutons.