White Soup
5 cups White Stock III 1/2 tablespoon salt 1/2 teaspoon peppercorns 1 slice onion 1 stalk celery 2 cups scalded milk 3 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons four Yolks 2 eggs Salt and pepper Add seasonings to stock, and simmer thirty minutes: strain, and thicken with butter and flour cooked together; add scalded milk. Dilute eggs, slightly beaten, with hot soup, and add to remaining soup; strain, and season with salt and pepper. Serve at once or soup will have a curdled appearance.
A classic velouté-style cream soup thickened twice, first with roux and then with egg yolks. The whole dish hinges on keeping the yolks below the point where they scramble.
- The hinge: temper the yolksBeat the yolks, whisk in a ladleful of the hot soup slowly to raise their temperature, then stir that mixture back into the pot off the heat. Once the yolks are in, the soup must never simmer again or it will curdle, which is exactly what the closing line warns about.
- "Four" is flourThe thickening is 3 tablespoons butter cooked with 4 tablespoons flour, a standard roux. Cook it a minute or two without letting it colour, since this soup should stay pale.
- White Stock IIIA light unbrowned veal or chicken stock from elsewhere in the book. Any good unsalted chicken stock works; avoid anything dark or heavily roasted.
- Salt quantityHalf a tablespoon of salt in the initial simmer assumes an unsalted stock. If your stock is already seasoned, start with a teaspoon and correct at the end.
- Scalded milkHeat the milk to just below boiling, until it steams and shows bubbles at the edge. Adding it hot shortens the finishing time.
- Peppercorns and aromaticsWhole peppercorns, a slice of onion and a celery stalk go in for the thirty-minute simmer and are strained out. The second strain, after the eggs, catches any threads of set yolk.
- YieldAbout seven cups finished, or six first-course servings. It does not reheat or hold well; make it immediately before serving.
Egg-thickened white soups belong to a long European line of "blancs" and potages à la reine, in which pounded almonds or chicken and cream produced a deliberately pale, delicate dish for the opening course. By the late nineteenth century the American cooking-school tradition had systematised the type: a numbered white stock, a measured roux, scalded milk and a yolk liaison, each step given in tablespoons so that a student could reproduce it. The warning that the soup must be served at once is the practical mark of that teaching style, naming the one failure a beginner was most likely to encounter rather than assuming it would be understood.