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Crême de Concombres à la
Reine. (Purée of Cucumbers.) Ingredients.
Three large Cucumbers.
Three ounces of Butter.
Two ounces of Flour.
Three pints of Chicken Stock.
One pint of Milk.
One gill of Cream.
The book gives the ingredients but not the method, so this is a shopping list for a classic cream soup rather than a set of directions. What follows fills in the working assumptions a cook of the period would have taken for granted.
- The missing methodThis is a velouté: butter and flour cooked to a pale roux, the chicken stock whisked in, the prepared cucumber simmered until soft, the whole passed through a sieve, then finished with hot milk and cream off the boil. Nothing in the ingredient list is unusual; the omission is the instructions themselves.
- A gillIn a British cookery book of this class a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, or a little under two-thirds of a US cup. American books of the same era often use a gill as half a US cup (4 fl oz); the difference here is immaterial to the finished soup.
- Cucumber preparationPeel, halve and scrape out the seeds, then salt the sliced flesh for twenty minutes and drain. Cucumbers of the period are often said to have been more watery and bitter than modern varieties, and unsalted seedy cucumber will thin and sour the puree.
- Roux to liquid ratioTwo ounces of flour to three pints of stock plus a pint of milk gives a deliberately thin soup, roughly the consistency of single cream. Do not expect a modern thick purée; if you want body, reduce the stock rather than adding flour.
- Chicken stockThe dish stands or falls on the stock. A pale, unsalted, well-gelatined chicken stock is what is meant, not a dark roasted one, and certainly not a cube, which will overwhelm the cucumber.
- FinishingAdd the cream off the heat and never let the soup boil after the milk goes in. Cucumber purée splits and turns grey-green if held at a boil, and the flavour is fugitive; serve it as soon as it is hot.
- Colour and seasoningThe finished soup should be very pale, almost ivory. Season with white pepper and salt only, and pass it through a fine sieve or chinois after blending for the smooth texture the name implies.
- YieldFour pints of liquid before reduction serves eight to ten as a first course.
À la reine is one of the standing formulas of nineteenth-century French service, and in soups it signals chicken: a chicken-stock base finished with cream, sometimes with white poultry meat pounded into the purée. Cucumber soups appear regularly in English and Franco-English cookery of the late Victorian and Edwardian period. The construction here — roux, white stock, milk, a final gill of cream — is the textbook velouté that Carême codified and Escoffier later tidied into the mother-sauce scheme, and the compiler evidently thought the method needed no writing down.