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Potage à la Crême d'Orge
(Pearl-Barley Soup.) Ingredients.
Five ounces of Butter or three-quarters of a pint of Double Cream. Two pints of White Stock.
Two ounces of Flour.
Two ounces of Pearl Barley.
The Yolks of four Eggs.
This entry gives only the ingredients — the method belonged to the facing page or to the cook's training. What follows is what the proportions tell you, and where the soup can go wrong.
- The hinge: the egg liaisonFour yolks whisked with the cream or butter go in off the heat at the very end, and the soup must not boil afterwards. Above roughly 180F the yolks curdle and the velvety body breaks into grains that no sieve will rescue.
- Butter or cream, not bothThe list offers a choice: five ounces of butter or three-quarters of a pint of double cream. The butter version gives the richer finish, the cream version a lighter soup. Three-quarters of an imperial pint is about 15 fluid ounces, roughly 1 3/4 US cups.
- White stockA pale, unroasted stock from veal bones and/or chicken, barely seasoned and unthickened. A good low-sodium chicken stock stands in; avoid anything brown or heavily reduced, which will muddy the colour this soup is named for.
- Pearl barley timingTwo ounces (about 1/3 cup) needs 45 minutes to an hour of gentle simmering in the stock before it will pass through a sieve or blend smooth. Rinse it first; the polishing dust clouds the soup.
- Flour and the rouxTwo ounces of flour (about 1/2 cup) cooked in butter makes a white roux -- keep it blond, with no colour at all. (If the cream option is taken, the butter for the roux is extra to the list.) Whisk the hot stock in gradually or the barley purs of paste.
- SievingPeriod practice was to force the cooked barley through a fine sieve or tammy. A blender does it faster, but still pass the soup through a chinois afterwards; residual bran and grain solids stay gritty however long you blend.
- YieldTwo pints of stock plus the enrichment gives roughly six small first-course servings, or four generous bowls.
- ServingTraditionally finished with cros fried in butter, or with a few grains of whole cooked barley dropped in as garnish. Season at the end, after any reduction.
Crme d'orge is simply "cream of barley," and the soup is a standard of the classical French repertoire that British hotel and country-house kitchens took up, French menu-names and all, in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The construction here -- white stock, a blond roux, a purof grain, and a final liaison of egg yolks with cream or butter -- is the textbook potage crme pattern of the period, before egg-yolk finishes gave way to straight cream. Pearl barley itself is barley whose hull and bran have been abraded away, a treatment valued because it cooks quickly and thickens without the earthy taste of the whole grain; barley was a kitchen thickener in Europe for centuries before white flour was cheap.