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Cream of Farina Soup
1 pt. boiling water 4 tablespoons farina 1 pt. milk 3 egg yolks 3 tablespoons cream 1/2 teaspoon salt Moisten farina with 4 tablespoons cold water, stir slowly into boiling salted water, cover and let cook gently for thirty minutes. Add the scalded milk slowly. Beat yolks, add cream and blend with the soup.
A plain wheat-cereal soup thickened at the end with an egg-and-cream liaison. Almost everything that can go wrong here happens in the last minute, when the yolks meet the hot soup.
- The hinge: temper the yolksBeat the yolks with the cream, then whisk in a ladleful of the hot soup before returning the mixture to the pot. Add it off the heat, then warm gently to about 170F while stirring; at a boil the yolks curdle and the soup turns grainy and cannot be recovered.
- What farina isMilled wheat endosperm, the product sold as Cream of Wheat; it is a finer, softer-wheat grind than durum semolina, though the two are sometimes used interchangeably in porridge. Do not substitute couscous or pasta semolina, which behave differently in liquid.
- Cooking timeThirty minutes suited the farina of the period. Modern quick-cooking farina is done in two to three minutes and regular farina in about ten; cook until the grains have no raw starch bite, and expect to add water if it stiffens.
- Moistening stepThe cold-water slurry is there to prevent lumps. Farina dropped dry into boiling water tends to clump on contact, and the lumps are troublesome to whisk smooth afterwards.
- Scalded milkScalding once served to check raw milk from souring; with pasteurized milk it simply keeps the soup from dropping to a cold standstill. Heat the pint to just steaming and add it in a stream.
- Measures1 pt. is 2 cups, so 4 cups of liquid in all against 4 tablespoons farina — a thin, drinkable soup rather than a porridge. 'Cream' in recipes of this period could be anything from a light table cream upward; either will work here.
- Yield and servingSomething under 4 cups after simmering, serving four as a first course. The original leaves it unseasoned beyond salt; white pepper or a grating of nutmeg would not be out of place. Serve at once, as it thickens and skins over on standing.
Cream soups built on a cereal grain rather than a flour roux were a staple of American cookery from the 1880s onward, promoted in domestic-science circles as nourishing invalid and nursery food that could be swallowed easily and digested without trouble. Farina was a familiar household commodity, and milling businesses sold farina and semolina alongside patent flour, so recipes using it served as advertising. The finish with egg yolks and cream is the classic French liaison, carried into American home cooking through the cooking-school textbooks of the same period, where it was the standard way to enrich a thin soup without adding more starch.