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Queen Soup
Wash and stew a fowl for an hour with enough strong veal broth to cover the meat and a bunch of parsley. Remove the fowl, cut the meat off, and take away the skin. Pound the flesh in a mortar and add some bread crumbs, that have been soaked in the liquor, and the yolks of 5 hard-boiled eggs. Rub this through a coarse sieve, then add a quart of boiled cream.
A white puree soup of the old French potage à la reine type, thickened with pounded chicken, egg yolk and crumb rather than flour. The whole point is smoothness, so the sieving and the final gentle reheating matter more than anything else.
- Never let it boil at the endOnce the cream is in, bring the soup only to steaming, around 170-180F. The yolks here are already hard-boiled, so they will not curdle, but a hard boil will make the cream-and-meat puree separate and catch on the bottom of the pan.
- "A fowl" means a stewing henA true boiling fowl is an older laying bird, tough and full of flavour, and one hour will not soften it; it needs 2 to 3 hours at a bare simmer. A supermarket 4-5 lb roasting chicken is the practical substitute and will be done in about an hour, as written, though the broth will be milder.
- Strong veal brothAn unsalted veal stock, reduced until it has body. Veal bones are still sold at good butchers; a light chicken stock with a couple of veal knuckle bones added is a fair stand-in. Avoid a dark roasted stock, which will colour the soup.
- Pounding, without a mortarA food processor does in thirty seconds what the mortar did in ten minutes. Work the breast and thigh meat with a ladle of the hot broth to a smooth paste, then pass it through the sieve as directed — the sieving is not optional, since it catches the tendon and gristle the blade only shreds.
- "A coarse sieve"In practice a medium mesh strainer, pressed through with the back of a ladle. A fine chinois will clog with the meat paste.
- A quart of cream is a great dealFour cups of cream against one fowl gives something closer to a rich sauce than a soup. Start with 2 cups and loosen the rest of the way with the reserved broth, adjusting to the thickness of pouring cream.
- SeasoningThe original gives none. Salt generously at the end — a puree of this kind tastes flat until it is properly salted — plus white pepper and, traditionally, a scrape of nutmeg or a little lemon juice to lift it.
- Yield and serviceAbout 2 quarts finished, serving 6 to 8 as a first course. Serve in warmed cups with croutons fried in butter, or with a little of the reserved white meat cut in fine dice.
Soups "à la reine" appear in French and English cookery from the seventeenth century onward and are generally traced to the taste for white, almond- and cream-thickened dishes at the French court; the name is usually attached to Marie de Médicis or to Anne of Austria, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. What defines the dish is its thickening: pounded white meat, soaked crumb and hard-boiled yolk, a technique that predates the flour-and-butter roux that later took over and is often linked to the almond-milk purees of medieval cookery.