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Soup a la Reine
1 large fowl 3 qts. cold water 1 cup rice 1 sliced carrot 1 sliced turnip 1 small piece celery 1 onion 1 small piece mace 3 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon Gold Medal flour 1 pt. cream 1 tablespoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper Cook whole fowl in salt water until tender, skim off the fat. Cook rice and vegetables in butter slowly for fifteen minutes, remove vegetables and add to the broth. Cook flour in the butter and add with mace and pepper to the soup. Cook all together slowly for two hours. Remove fowl. Chop and pound the breast of the fowl very fine. Rub the soup through a fine sieve, add the pounded breast, and again rub the whole through a coarse sieve. Add cream and reheat.
A classic white chicken purée soup, thickened with rice rather than a heavy roux. The work is in the sieving, and a blender does most of it now.
- The fowlA "large fowl" means an older stewing hen, 5-6 lb, which is what gives the broth its body. A supermarket roasting chicken of 4-5 lb works but simmers tender in about 1 1/4 hours rather than the 2-3 hours an old bird needs; taste the broth and reduce it if it seems thin.
- QuantitiesA pint of cream is 2 cups, a quart is 4 cups. Three quarts of water will reduce considerably over the long simmering, so expect roughly 2 to 2 1/2 quarts of finished soup, serving eight to ten as a first course.
- Mace"A small piece" means a shard of the dried outer covering of nutmeg, blade mace. Ground mace substitutes at about 1/4 teaspoon; add it late, since ground spice loses its perfume in a two-hour simmer.
- The order of operationsThe instructions are compressed to the point of confusion. Simmer the fowl in the water with the salt; separately sweat the rice and sliced vegetables in the butter for fifteen minutes. The recipe says to remove the vegetables and add them to the broth, and says nothing explicit about the rice, though it must go in too since the whole soup is later sieved. The tablespoon of flour is cooked in whatever butter remains and stirred in to bind.
- SievingTwo passes through sieves, fine and then coarse, are the period route to a smooth purée. A blender or immersion blender gets there in a minute; pass it once through a fine sieve afterward if you want the old texture.
- The hingeAdd the cream at the end and reheat only to just below a simmer. Hard boiling after the cream goes in risks curdling it, and the single tablespoon of flour is little help in holding it together.
- SaltA full tablespoon in three quarts of water is reasonable for cooking the bird, but season again at the end after the liquid has reduced and the cream has gone in.
- Using the rest of the birdOnly the breast is pounded into the soup. The recipe says nothing about the legs and thighs, which are left over; creamed, in croquettes, or in a salad are the obvious uses.
"À la reine" -- in the queen's style -- was a French kitchen term for a white dish enriched with cream and puréed poultry, and by the nineteenth century potage à la reine was a fixture of formal menus on both sides of the Atlantic; the name is often traced to the court of the French queens, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. Its appearance in a flour company's promotional cookbook is telling: books like this one were distributed to sell a branded product, and they hedged between plain farm cookery and the genteel French-titled dishes a hostess might want for company. The single tablespoon of Gold Medal flour here is almost token, which is rather the point -- the brand name had to appear in the ingredient list.