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Cream of Watercress Soup
2 cups White Stock I, II or III 2 bunches watercress 3 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1/2 cup milk Yolk 1 egg Salt Pepper Cut finely leaves of watercress; cook five minutes in two tablespoons butter, add stock, and boil five minutes. Thicken with butter and flour cooked together, add salt and pepper. Just before serving, add milk and egg yolk, slightly beaten. Serve with slices of French bread, browned in oven.
A small, quickly made soup that depends on two things: not overcooking the cress, and not scrambling the egg yolk at the end.
- The hinge: the yolkOnce the milk and yolk go in, the soup must not return to a boil or it will curdle into threads. Take the pan off the heat, whisk a ladle of hot soup into the beaten yolk and milk first, then stir that back in and warm through gently.
- White stockThe book's White Stock I, II or III are numbered variants of a light, unbrowned stock. A good unsalted chicken stock is the closest substitute; avoid dark or heavily reduced stocks, which fight the cress.
- Splitting the butterThree tablespoons total: two for wilting the cress, the remaining one cooked with the flour as a roux. Two tablespoons of flour to one of butter is a dry, stiff paste — work in a little of the hot stock to loosen it before stirring it into the pot, or use equal parts butter and flour and accept a slightly thinner soup.
- Two bunches of watercressBunch size is not fixed; figure roughly 6 to 8 oz of cress, leaves picked from the coarse stems. Thick stems can make the soup stringy.
- Cooking timesFive minutes in butter and five in stock is enough to soften the leaves; the colour will dull somewhat even so. Longer and the soup goes olive-drab and takes on a cabbagey smell, as the mustard-oil compounds in cress break down with heat.
- YieldTwo cups of stock plus a half cup of milk makes two small servings, or four as a first course in demitasse cups. Scale up freely; keep the one yolk per 2 to 3 cups of liquid ratio.
- The croutonsSlices of French bread browned in the oven means dry-toasted, not fried: single layer in a moderate oven, turned once, until dry and coloured. Butter after toasting if at all.
- SeasoningSalt at the end rather than the start. Cress is peppery on its own, so taste before adding pepper.
Watercress was one of the cheapest greens in nineteenth-century Britain and America, gathered from running streams and sold in bunches by street hawkers; commercial cultivation in flooded beds developed alongside that trade rather than after it. Its arrival in a cream soup here reflects the way turn-of-the-century domestic-science cookery treated the whole soup chapter as a system: a numbered white stock made once, then varied with whatever green or root was in season, bound with a butter-and-flour roux and enriched at the last moment with milk and an egg yolk. That final liaison is a French technique. Cress soups are often served cold in modern kitchens, but this one is firmly a hot dish, with oven-dried bread standing in for fried croutons.