Imperial Soup
4 cups White Stock III 2 cups stale bread crumbs 2 stalks celery, broken in pieces 2 slices carrot, cut in cubes 1 small onion 3 tablespoons butter Sprig of parsley 2 cloves 1/2 teaspoon peppercorns Bit of bay leaf Blade of mace 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 breast boiled chicken 1/3 cup blanched almonds 1 cup cream 1/2 cup milk 2 tablespoons flour Cook celery, carrot, and onion in one tablespoon butter five minutes; tie in cheesecloth with parsley, cloves, peppercorns, bay leaf, and mace; add to stock with salt and bread crumbs, simmer one hour, remove seasonings, and rub through a sieve. Chop chicken meat and rub through sieve; pound almonds to a paste, add to chicken, then add cream. Combine mixtures, add milk, reheat, and bind with remaining butter and flour cooked together.
A white almond-and-chicken soup of the Boston cooking-school type, thickened three ways at once: bread, nut paste and a butter-flour binding. The sieve work is the whole job, and a blender removes most of it.
- White Stock IIIA cross-reference to a numbered basic stock elsewhere in the book; white stocks of this period are generally light veal and/or fowl, unbrowned. Any unsalted light chicken or veal stock works; avoid dark or heavily reduced stock, which will muddy the colour the recipe is built around.
- Stale bread crumbsSoft crumbs torn from day-old white bread, not the dry sandy crumbs sold for coating. Two cups of soft crumbs is roughly 3 oz; dried crumbs would weigh considerably more for the same volume and turn the soup to paste.
- The spice bundleTying celery, carrot, onion, parsley, cloves, peppercorns, bay and mace in cheesecloth is what lets you pull the whole lot out cleanly before sieving. Blade of mace is the outer covering of nutmeg in its dried flat form; about a quarter teaspoon of ground mace substitutes, though it will cloud the soup slightly.
- AlmondsBlanched means skinned, which matters here for colour. Pounding to a paste in a mortar takes real time; a food processor with a spoonful of the cream will get there in a minute, but stop before the nuts turn oily.
- SievingThe original rubs the soup through a sieve, and separately rubs the chopped chicken through, with the pounded almond paste added to the chicken. A blender takes over most of this, though a final pass through a fine strainer still catches almond grit and celery fibre and is worth the two minutes.
- The bindingThe remaining two tablespoons butter cooked with two tablespoons flour is a white roux; the recipe specifies they are cooked together. Cook it a minute or two without colouring, whisk in a ladle of the hot soup, then return it, or the flour will taste raw.
- Heat after the creamOnce the cream and milk are in, reheat to steaming rather than boiling; hard boiling risks curdling the dairy and coarsening the texture.
- YieldRoughly six to seven cups finished depending on how much reduces during the hour's simmer, or six small first-course servings. It is rich enough that a cup is plenty. Taste before adding the full teaspoon of salt, since the stock and the boiled chicken may already be seasoned.
White soups thickened with pounded almonds are a long-running thread in European cookery, running from medieval blancmange \timeaning roughly a white dish\ti through the eighteenth-century English "white soup" served at assemblies and balls. By the time this book was written, in the era of American cooking-school instruction associated with level measurement and numbered basic stocks, the form had been tidied into something a household cook could reproduce closely: a named stock, a measured binding, a sieve. Grand names like Imperial were often attached to such soups on hotel and banquet menus and seem to have carried no fixed meaning. What dates the recipe most clearly is the labour it assumes: pounding nuts in a mortar and forcing cooked chicken through a sieve by hand.