Home › Cream Soups › Cream of Barley Soup
Cream of Barley Soup
To 3 pints of chicken broth or stock add a sliced onion, a small stick of cinnamon, a blade of mace, and a cupful of barley. Let it boil up and then simmer slowly, for four or five hours, and strain through a fine sieve. Put it back in the saucepan and add 1/2 pint of boiling cream or milk with 2 tablespoonfuls of butter; season to taste with salt and pepper. Beat the yolks of 3 eggs, mix with them a cupful of milk; pour gradually into the soup, stirring briskly for two minutes. It must not boil after the eggs are added. Serve with croutons or toasted wafers.
A classic pearl-barley velouté finished with an egg-yolk liaison. The whole dish hangs on the last step: the eggs thicken but must never boil.
- The hinge: do not boil after the eggsOnce the yolk-and-milk mixture goes in, hold the soup at 160-175F and stir constantly for two minutes. A simmer will scramble the yolks into grains that no amount of straining will smooth out.
- Temper the yolksWhisking a ladle or two of the hot soup into the beaten yolks and milk before returning the mixture to the pan is easier than the original's method, which relies instead on pouring gradually and stirring briskly.
- Barley and the long simmerPearl barley is the probable intention, though pot (Scotch) barley was also in use. Four to five hours is far longer than needed to soften it; 60-90 minutes gives a broth thoroughly thickened by released starch, and the extra time mainly reduces the liquid. Keep an eye on the volume and top up with stock.
- StrainingPressing the softened barley and onion through a fine sieve gives the body. A blender or food mill first, then the sieve, gets you further with less work.
- Measures3 pints is 6 cups; 1/2 pint of cream is 1 cup. "A cupful of barley" is roughly 7 oz dry, which is generous for this volume of stock -- expect a thick soup.
- Whole spicesA blade of mace is one piece of the dried outer covering of nutmeg; roughly 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon ground mace substitutes. Fish out the cinnamon stick and mace before straining if you want them to read as background rather than foreground.
- Season at the endLong reduction concentrates whatever salt is in the stock. Salt and pepper only after the cream is in and the soup is at final volume.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts finished, serving six to eight as a first course. It thickens further on standing; loosen with hot stock or milk when reheating gently.
Cream soups of this kind were a staple of the formal first course in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American and British cookery: a starch cooked to collapse in good stock, sieved, enriched with cream, and bound at the last moment with egg yolks in the manner French kitchens called a liaison. Barley is among the oldest of the cultivated grains, and barley water and barley broths had a long life in invalid cookery, recommended as gentle and strengthening. The cinnamon and mace reflect an older seasoning habit, when sweet spices were used freely in savoury dishes, and such spicing became less common in cream soups over the twentieth century.