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Twelve White Peppercorns
Salt. Two quarts of Veal or White Stock.
Cut the fowl in pieces, well wash it, put it in a stewpan previously buttered, with the onion, mace, &c. Put the lid on, let it cook over the fire ten minutes, taking care that it does not brown; add the stock; simmer this gently one hour.
Next put in a stewpan- Two ounces of Butter.
Two ounces of Flour (Vienna).
One Chicken. A little Mace. Bay-leaf. Parsley Stalks. When well melted, strain the liquor from the chicken into it, and stir well; let it cook a few minutes; add the juice of half a lemon and half a pint of cream.
Take the best pieces of chicken from the bones, pound in the mortar, add to the stock, and then strain through a tammy-cloth.
This soup must not boil after the chicken and cream are added.
This page is the tail end of a chicken cream soup — the printed ingredient list has been cut off mid-line, so the fowl, onion, mace and the twelve white peppercorns of the title all appear only in passing. What survives is a classic purée à la reine: a boiling fowl sweated in butter, simmered in white stock, thickened with a blond roux and finished with cream.
- The missing ingredientsWork from the method: one boiling fowl (a modern 4-5 lb chicken), one onion, a blade or two of mace, twelve white peppercorns, salt, two quarts of veal or white stock. Everything after that is given in full.
- The hinge — no boiling at the endThe last line is the whole point. Once the pounded chicken and the cream go in, the soup is held below a simmer. Boiling splits the cream, especially with lemon juice already in the pan, and coarsens the delicate flavour the sweating step was meant to protect.
- Sweat, do not colourTen minutes with the lid on in a buttered pan is a sweat, not a fry. Keep the heat low; any browning turns a white soup grey and pushes it toward a brown fricassee flavour.
- Vienna flourA finely milled, strong white wheat flour sold in Britain in the later nineteenth century, the name taken from the roller-milled flours associated with Vienna and Hungary. Ordinary plain flour works; two ounces of butter to two ounces of flour gives a blond roux, on the light side for two quarts, with the cream and the pounded chicken supplying the rest of the body.
- Boiling fowl versus supermarket chickenThe original assumes an older laying bird that will stand an hour's simmering and give a strongly flavoured stock. A modern roasting chicken is done well before that — check the breast at 30-35 minutes and lift it out, or the meat will be dry and stringy in the mortar.
- Mortar and tammy-clothPounding the best meat to a paste and forcing it through a tammy (a fine worsted straining cloth) is what gives the soup body. A food processor followed by a fine chinois or a double layer of muslin does the same job in a fraction of the time.
- Quantities and yieldTwo quarts of stock, half a pint of cream and the juice of half a lemon give roughly eight generous soup plates. Note that Victorian British pints are 20 fl oz, so the cream is about 1¼ US cups.
- Seasoning orderThe fragment lists salt among the ingredients, and the '&c.' in the method suggests it went in with the aromatics; if you prefer, hold it back. An hour's gentle simmer concentrates whatever seasoning is already in the stock, and cream blunts the perception of salt — so taste after the cream is in and adjust off the heat.
This is a survivor of the great family of white soups that dominated the first course of British and French dinners through the nineteenth century — thickened chicken purées that ran under names such as purée à la reine and, when garnished with almonds, the older English "white soup" served at balls and suppers. The technique is of a kind often associated with Escoffier-era practice as taught in the British cookery schools: a fowl sweated without colour, a white stock, a blond roux, and a liaison of cream and lemon added off the boil. The equipment is assumed here without comment — a mortar large enough to pound a bird's worth of breast meat, and a tammy-cloth, the fine worsted sieve that was the mark of a serious kitchen and the reason such soups were called "tammied." The instruction not to boil after the cream is added is part of the same careful handling.