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Irish Soup, or Balnamoon Skink
Put a couple of fowls into a pot, and boil until their juices are thoroughly extracted and the broth is rich and good. One of the fowls may be trussed as for boiling and removed as soon as cooked, but they are best cut up when intended only for soup. When well boiled, strain the soup through a colander into a clean saucepan. Season with salt, pepper, sweet herbs, chives, and chopped onions. Add celery, lettuce, and, if in season, green peas. Stew until the vegetables are tender. 2 eggs, well beaten, added to a cup of cream and stirred into the soup, will greatly improve it. The trussed fowl is sometimes served in the tureen with the soup. When sent to the table separately, thicken some of the broth and pour it over the fowl.
A two-stage soup: a long-simmered fowl broth, then a quick vegetable stew finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. The finish is where it succeeds or curdles.
- Never boil after the eggs go inBeat the 2 eggs into the cup of cream, temper with a ladle of hot soup, then stir the mixture back into the pot off the heat or over the lowest flame. Above roughly 180F the eggs scramble and the soup turns grainy.
- "A couple of fowls"A fowl meant a mature laying hen, tougher and far more flavourful than a modern broiler. Two supermarket chickens of about 4 lb each will do; a single hen or capon plus a pound of wings and thighs gives closer to the original body and gelatine.
- How long "until well boiled" isKeep it at a bare simmer, never a rolling boil, or the broth clouds. Cut-up birds give a rich broth in about 2 hours; an old hen wants 3 or more. A bird trussed whole and lifted out is done at 165F in the thigh, usually 60 to 75 minutes.
- StrainingA colander only holds back the bones and skin. Line it with damp muslin, or strain twice, if you want a clearer soup. Skim the fat after straining, when it has risen.
- The vegetables are a garnish, not a baseCelery and green peas need 5 to 8 minutes; the lettuce, shredded, needs 1 or 2 and should stay green. 'Stew until tender' may have suited peas picked larger and starchier than the small modern garden pea.
- Sweet herbsParsley, thyme and a bay leaf, with the chives added at the end so they keep their bite. Tie the woody herbs in a bundle and remove them before the cream goes in.
- Thickening for the served fowlLadle off some broth before the egg and cream stage and thicken it with a roux of equal butter and flour, about 1 tablespoon of each per cup. Do not try to thicken soup that already holds the liaison.
- YieldTwo birds and this much cream make 10 to 12 servings as a first course, less if the whole fowl is carved at table as the main dish.
Skink is an old Scots and northern word for a shin of beef and, by extension, for the soup made from it, surviving best in Cullen skink; here it has drifted to mean a rich fowl broth. The dish is usually associated with a house called Balnamoon, most often placed in County Monaghan, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented, and it belongs to a small family of Anglo-Irish country-house soups in which a boiling hen served two purposes at once: the bird carried to table with a thickened sauce, and its cooking liquor turned into a delicate green soup with peas, lettuce and chives. The egg-and-cream liaison is standard eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practice, the same finish used for white soups and fricassees before flour-thickened veloutés became the default.