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Chicken Soup with Wine
3 lb. fowl 2 quarts cold water 2 slices carrot 1 tablespoon salt 1/2 teaspoon peppercorns 1 cup cream 1 onion, sliced 2 stalks celery Bit of bay leaf 2 tablespoons Sauterne wine 1 teaspoon beef extract Salt Pepper Wipe and cut up fowl. Cover with water, and add carrot, salt, peppercorns, onion, celery, and bay leaf. Bring quickly to boiling-point, then let simmer until meat is tender. Remove meat and strain stock. Chill, remove fat, reheat, and add wine, beef extract, and cream. Season with salt and pepper.
A clear chicken stock enriched at the last moment with cream and wine — the sort of light "cream soup" that opened a formal dinner around 1900. Nearly all the work is in the stockpot, and the finishing takes five minutes.
- What a "fowl" isA fowl means an old laying hen, tougher and more flavourful than a broiler. A stewing hen or boiling fowl from a butcher is the closest thing; failing that use a roasting chicken of about the same 3 lb weight and accept a milder stock. Backs, wings and feet added to the pot will restore some of the missing body.
- Simmering timeThe recipe says only "until tender." A true fowl wants 2½ to 3 hours at a bare simmer; a supermarket chicken will be done in about 1¼ hours. Keep the surface barely trembling — a rolling boil emulsifies the fat and clouds the stock, which defeats the point of a clear soup.
- Beef extractThis is concentrated meat glaze — Bovril, Liebig's, or a modern equivalent such as a beef base paste. One teaspoon in two quarts is there for depth and colour, not beef flavour. Bouillon cubes will work but push the salt up sharply, so hold back on seasoning until after they are in.
- SauterneIn American cookbooks of this period "Sauterne" (without the final s) was a generic label for white table wine, not the sweet Sauternes of Bordeaux. Use a dry white — a Sauvignon Blanc or unoaked Chardonnay — or a dry sherry if you want more character.
- Don't boil after the creamAdd the wine and extract first and let the stock come back to heat, then stir in the cream and pull the pan off before it boils. Cream held at a boil in an acidic, wine-spiked stock will curdle. Warming the cream separately before it goes in reduces the shock.
- The chilling step is not optionalChilling the strained stock lets the fat set into a cap you can lift off. A fowl can give up a good deal of fat, and cream on top of it makes a greasy soup. In practice this means the dish is easiest begun a day ahead.
- SaltOne tablespoon of salt goes into two quarts at the start, then the finished soup is seasoned again. Add half at the outset, since the stock will reduce as it simmers and the beef extract brings salt of its own.
- Yield and the leftover meatExpect about six cups, enough for six first-course servings. The cooked meat has given most of its flavour to the stock but is still good in a chicken salad, hash, or croquettes.
Soups like this one belong to the boiled-fowl economy of the late nineteenth-century American kitchen, where an old hen past laying was worth more as stock than as a roast, and the flesh often went on to a second appearance as croquettes or salad. The finishing touch — a spoonful of wine and a cup of cream stirred in off the heat — echoes French restaurant practice, and the teaspoon of beef extract reflects the era's enthusiasm for Liebig's meat concentrates, marketed from the 1860s as both a cook's shortcut and an invalid's tonic. The spelling "Sauterne" is itself a period marker: American wineries and importers used the term loosely for white table wine generally, so a cook following this recipe was unlikely to have reached for a sweet dessert wine.