Chicken Soup
6 cups White Stock III 1 tablespoon lean raw ham, finely chopped 6 slices carrot, cut in cubes 2 stalks celery 1/2 bay leaf 1/4 teaspoon peppercorns 1 sliced onion 1/3 cup hot boiled rice Add seasonings to stock, heat gradually to boiling-point, and boil thirty minutes; strain, and add rice.
A clear chicken broth built on a stock made earlier in the book, infused with aromatics and finished with rice. The whole dish depends on the quality of the base stock.
- White Stock IIIThe book's white stock is a light poultry or veal stock, simmered and skimmed until clear rather than browned first. Six cups of a good unsalted chicken stock stands in directly; avoid dark brown stocks, which defeat the pale colour the recipe is after.
- "Add seasonings"Here that means everything in the list except the rice: the ham, carrot, celery, bay leaf, peppercorns and onion all go into the cold stock together. The peppercorns are whole and are strained out later, so do not grind them.
- The lean raw hamA single tablespoon of finely chopped raw ham is a seasoning, not a meat component. Uncooked country ham or prosciutto scraps give the intended salty depth; ordinary cooked deli ham contributes little.
- Boiling versus simmeringThe recipe says plainly to heat gradually to the boiling-point and boil thirty minutes. Thirty minutes at a true rolling boil will cloud the broth, so if you want a limpid result, hold it instead at a bare tremble for the half hour.
- StrainingStrain through a fine sieve lined with damp muslin or a coffee filter for a properly limpid soup. Press the solids only if you do not mind slight cloudiness.
- The riceA third of a cup of cooked rice is added hot, off the heat, to keep the grains distinct and the broth clear. Cooking raw rice in the stock instead will thicken and cloud it.
- SaltNo salt is listed at all; whatever seasoning the soup has comes from the base stock and the ham. Taste after straining and adjust.
- YieldSomewhat under the starting six cups once it has boiled for half an hour and been strained; enough for four to six small first-course servings.
Clear soups of this kind were a staple of formal American dinner service around 1900, when a meal was commonly expected to open with either a clear broth or a thick cream soup. Cookery schools of the period, of which this book is a product, taught stock-making as a numbered sequence -- white, brown, and their variants -- so that a single well-made pot could be turned into many named soups by changing only the aromatics and the garnish. The rice here is that garnish, and the scrap of raw ham is the sort of addition also found in French stock-making, where cured pork was used to add savour without darkening a light stock. What looks like an unusually spare recipe is really shorthand: the real labour happened hours earlier, in the stockpot.