Royal Soup
1 cup stale bread crumbs 1/2 cup milk Yolks 3 "hard-boiled" eggs Breast meat from a boiled chicken Salt and pepper 1 1/2 cups scalded milk 3 1/2 cups White Stock III 2 1/2 tablespoons butter 2 1/2 tablespoons flour Soak bread crumbs in milk, add yolks of eggs rubbed through a sieve and chicken meat also rubbed through a sieve. Add gradually milk, and chicken stock highly, seasoned. Bind with butter and flour cooked together, and season with salt and pepper.
St. Germain Soup 3 cups White Stock I, II, or III 1 can Marrowfat peas 1 cup cold water 1/2 onion Bit of bay leaf Sprig of parsley Blade of mace 2 teaspoons sugar 1 teaspoon salt 1/3 teaspoon pepper 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons cornstarch 1 cup milk Drain and rinse peas, reserving one-third cup; put remainder in cold water with seasonings, and simmer one-half hour; rub through sieve and add stock. Bind with butter and cornstarch cooked together; boil five minutes. Add milk and reserved peas.
A puréed cream soup of the old school: bread crumbs, sieved egg yolk and sieved chicken breast carried in stock and milk, thickened with a roux. It relies on leftovers from a boiled fowl.
- The hingeEverything depends on how fine the purée is. A tamis or sieve was the original tool; a blender or food processor followed by a pass through a fine sieve gives a smoother result and takes minutes rather than a quarter hour of pushing.
- White Stock IIIA cross-reference to the book's own stock chapter, a light white stock of the veal-and-fowl type. A good low-sodium chicken stock stands in, but season it firmly, as the recipe insists, since bread and milk both mute salt.
- Quantity of chicken"Breast meat from a boiled chicken" is left vague; reckon on the two breast halves of a small bird, roughly 8 to 10 oz cooked meat, for the volume of liquid given.
- "Hard-boiled" yolksThe quotation marks in the original most likely flag the term as a misnomer: period cookery writers objected that eggs should be cooked gently below the boil rather than hard-boiled. Firm, tender yolks sieve smoothly; overcooked grey-green ones taste sulphurous.
- Stale bread crumbsMost likely soft crumbs from day-old white bread rather than dry, finely sifted crumbs, which soak up more milk and go pasty. A cup of soft crumbs is loosely packed.
- BindingCook the butter and flour together without colouring, then whisk it into the hot soup and simmer several minutes to lose the raw flour taste. Adding it as a raw paste leaves a pasty edge.
- Scalded milkMilk brought just to the point where it steams and shows bubbles at the rim, about 180F. Scalding was originally a safety and keeping measure; with pasteurised milk it now only serves to keep the soup from cooling as it is added.
- YieldSomething over five and a half cups of liquid before the solids, so roughly six cups of finished soup, serving four to six as a first course. Serve at once - reheated, the egg yolk and bread thicken further and the soup wants thinning with more stock.
"Royal" in nineteenth-century soup naming often signals enrichment with egg - the French a la royale covered both egg-thickened pur\ard cut into shapes and floated in clear broth. This version belongs to the American cooking-school tradition of the 1890s and 1900s. Sieving cooked meat to a paste was ordinary work in a kitchen without an electric motor. The cream-soup chapter of such books leans heavily on the flour-and-butter binding that Fannie Farmer and her contemporaries taught as a fixed formula, applied indifferently to peas, chicken or celery.