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Two Yolks of Eggs (Seasoning Bread Cro tons)
Seasoning. Bread Croûtons.
Peel the cucumbers, cut them into quarters, remove the seeds and slice coarsely. Boil in salted water till tender, drain, and put in a stewpan with one ounce of butter. Let them stew for about half an hour. Season with pepper, salt, and half a teaspoonful of sugar. Melt the remaining two ounces of butter in another stewpan, stir in the flour, cook it without browning, add the stock, let it boil up, skim it, and add the milk boiling and the cooked cucumber; cook slowly for twenty minutes. Then rub it through a fine sieve. Stir the cream and yolks of eggs well together, pour them into the purée, return the purée to the fire, stir until the liaison of eggs and cream is formed, then pour it into a soup tureen, and serve with croûtons.
This is a cream of cucumber soup, finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. The page as printed has lost most of its ingredient list — the title is a fragment of it — so quantities have to be reasoned out from the method rather than read off.
- What the missing list must have heldThe method calls for one ounce of butter for the cucumbers plus "the remaining two ounces", so three ounces of butter in total. Flour, stock, milk and cream quantities are genuinely absent; for a soup of this style a working ratio is 2 oz flour to about 1 pint each of stock and milk, with a gill of cream (an imperial gill is five fluid ounces) and the two yolks. Treat those as reconstruction, not as the book's figures.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the yolks and cream go in, the soup must not boil. Hold it below a simmer, around 175F, stirring until it thickens slightly and coats the spoon. A single boil curdles the yolks and the purée turns grainy.
- StewpanA stewpan is a lidded saucepan, generally straight-sided. Two are needed here: one for the cucumbers, one for the roux.
- CucumbersOutdoor ridge cucumbers of the period tended to be thick-skinned with coarse seeds, which may be why the recipe peels and seeds them. Modern hothouse or English cucumbers still want peeling for a pale soup, and seeding is quick — check for tenderness well before the stated half hour of stewing.
- A gill and other old measuresA gill is a quarter of a pint: five fluid ounces in British books of this period (the American gill is four). If the lost list specified cream in gills, that is the conversion.
- Cook the flour without colourThe instruction to cook the roux "without browning" matters for appearance as much as flavour: this soup should be ivory. Two or three minutes over low heat is enough to lose the raw-flour taste.
- SievingRubbing through a fine sieve was the usual route to a smooth purée before mechanical blenders. A blender does it faster, but pass it through a sieve afterwards anyway to catch skin and seed fragments.
- Yield and servingOn the quantities above, about six small soup-plate servings. Fry the croûtons in butter and add them at the table, not in the tureen, or they go soft.
Cucumber soup, hot and thickened with a liaison of yolks and cream, belonged to the *potages* section of the classic British and Franco-British repertoire — a light first course meant to precede fish and game rather than stand as a meal. The finishing technique is the French *liaison à l'œuf*, and it is the reason the method insists on the purée going back to the fire only to be stirred, never boiled. Also worth noting is the garbled title, "Two Yolks of Eggs (Seasoning Bread Croûtons)", which is plainly a stranded fragment of the ingredient list, though how it came adrift is anyone's guess.