Home › Soups › Salt and Cayenne (Put the stock in a stewpan)
Salt and Cayenne (Put the stock in a stewpan)
Put the stock in a stewpan to boil, add the macaroni cut up into pieces half an inch long; when this is cooked mix the eggs and cream together in a basin, then draw the stewpan off the fire and add the cream and eggs, the grated cheese, a little cayenne and salt. The soup must not boil after the cheese and liaison are in, or it will be spoilt.
This is the second half of a recipe — the ingredient list sat above it in the original book, so no quantities survive here. The method itself is complete, and it is the method that matters: this is a cheese soup thickened with an egg-and-cream liaison.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the eggs, cream and cheese go in, the soup must stay below a simmer — roughly 170–180F. Above that the egg proteins seize and you get a broth full of scrambled threads with a slick of separated cheese fat on top. Take the pan fully off the heat, as written, rather than turning the burner down.
- Temper before you pourWhisk a ladleful of the hot stock into the beaten egg-and-cream mixture in the basin, then return the lot to the pan. The original does not mention this step; pouring a cold liaison straight into hot stock makes curdling more likely.
- Missing quantitiesFor a soup serving six, a workable proportion is 2 quarts good white stock, 3 oz macaroni, 3 eggs (the recipe says eggs, not yolks) beaten with a scant cup of cream, and 3-4 oz finely grated hard cheese. These are a modern suggestion, not from the book.
- StewpanA wide, heavy-bottomed saucepan. Weight matters more than shape here — a thin pan will carry residual heat unevenly and curdle the liaison in patches after you take it off the fire.
- MacaroniVictorian macaroni was a long hollow tube, hence the instruction to cut it into half-inch lengths. Modern elbow macaroni needs no cutting. Boil it separately in salted water if you want a clear soup; cooked in the stock it will cloud and thicken it with starch.
- The cheeseParmesan is the likely intention in a book of this sort, though a dry Cheddar or Gruyère works. Grate it fine and add it off the heat in handfuls, stirring each in before the next, so it melts rather than clumps.
- Holding and reheatingAn egg-liaison soup will not keep hot on a stove and will not reheat without splitting. Finish it immediately before it goes to the table.
A liaison of egg yolks and cream is one of the oldest thickeners in the European kitchen, older than the roux-based veloutés that came to dominate professional cookery, and it survives in classical practice in soups such as potage à la reine and in the finishing of blanquettes. Its appeal was richness without the pastiness of flour, and its price was that the soup became a last-minute dish requiring judgement rather than a timer. The macaroni and grated cheese here reflect the growing familiarity of Italian pasta in nineteenth-century Britain, where macaroni was sold dried in long tubes and turned up in soups and puddings as readily as in anything resembling an Italian dish. The stern closing warning, that the soup will be spoilt if it boils, is the kind of admonition common in cookery manuals of the period.