Du Barry Soup
Boil one cup of rice in two quarts of clear chicken bouillon, rub through and add one cup of cold cauliflower pressed through a potato ricer. Season with white pepper and salt, add a pint of cream and bring again to the boil.
Serve in bouillon cups, garnish with small flowerets of cauliflower.
A rice-thickened cauliflower velouté of the sort that filled the soup course at Edwardian dinners. The method assumes leftover cooked cauliflower and a well-made stock; both assumptions matter more than anything else in the text.
- The cauliflower must already be cooked"One cup of cold cauliflower" means cooked cauliflower gone cold, not raw. Raw florets will not go through a ricer and will taste harsh and sulphurous in the finished soup.
- Rub through means sieveThe rice is cooked soft in the bouillon, then forced through a fine sieve or tamis with a wooden spoon or pestle. A blender or immersion blender does the same work in under a minute; pass the result through a chinois if you want the smooth, faintly glossy texture the original is after.
- Quantities and yieldTwo quarts of stock plus a pint of cream, less reduction, gives roughly two and a half quarts. Bouillon cups hold about 5-6 oz, so this serves twelve to fourteen as a first course, or eight in ordinary soup bowls.
- Bring the cream to the boil gently"Bring again to the boil" is the period instruction for reheating; take it as bringing just to a shiver at the edges. A hard rolling boil after the cream goes in risks the starch-and-dairy mixture catching on the pan bottom and scorching, which is the one flaw this soup cannot recover from.
- Rice as thickenerOne cup of raw rice in two quarts of liquid is a substantial amount of starch. Long-grain rice gives a lighter body; short-grain or arborio will make it noticeably thick. If it stiffens on standing, loosen with more bouillon rather than more cream.
- White pepper is deliberateBlack pepper leaves visible specks in a white soup, which is why period cooks kept white pepper for cream soups and béchamels. Season at the end, after the cream, since the cream mutes salt.
- The garnishBreak off very small florets, blanch them separately in salted water for two or three minutes and refresh, then warm them in the soup at the last moment. Cooking them in the soup body clouds it.
- Bouillon cupsTwo-handled china cups, generally somewhere around 6 to 8 oz, standard on a formal table of the era. Any small cup or shallow bowl works; the two handles suggest a cream soup was drunk as much as eaten.
In classical French kitchen shorthand, à la Du Barry means cauliflower — a garnish name attached, by long tradition, to Jeanne Bécu, comtesse du Barry, the last maîtresse-en-titre of Louis XV, though the association is culinary convention rather than anything documented from her own table. Escoffier codified crème Du Barry in the standard repertoire, and by the time American household books were printing menus for formal dinners the name carried enough prestige to be worth keeping untranslated. The rice here does the work that a roux or a potato would do in other versions: it gives a cream soup body without flour, and it also let a cook stretch a small quantity of leftover cauliflower across a dozen bouillon cups — an economy that a book like this one, written for households with a cook but not an unlimited larder, took seriously.