Windsor Soup
(FOR SIX PERSONS.) Ingredients.
Nine ounces of Butter.
Two ounces of Flour.
Two pints of Stock.
Two ounces of Pearl Barley.
Yolks of four Eggs.
Three-quarters of a pint of Double Cream.
This is one of the skeleton entries typical of a cookery-school manual: quantities only, with the method expected from the demonstration or the lesson notes. The ingredients themselves tell you a good deal about how it was assembled.
- Imperial pintsTwo pints of stock is 40 fl oz, or 5 US cups; three-quarters of a pint of cream is 15 fl oz, just under 2 US cups. "Double cream" is roughly 48% fat, so heavy cream is the nearest substitute.
- The butter figure is suspectNine ounces of butter against two ounces of flour will not make a workable roux, and for six portions it is far beyond anything the rest of the list suggests. Either a large part of it was used elsewhere in the original method or the figure is a misprint; treat it as ambiguous rather than as a conversion problem, and build the liaison on a conventional 2 oz butter to 2 oz flour.
- Pearl barley timingPearl barley wants 40 to 50 minutes of gentle simmering before it will give up any body, and it should be rinsed and blanched first or the soup turns cloudy and starchy. Adding it to the finished velouté at the last minute, as the bare list might suggest, leaves it hard.
- The hinge: the egg and cream liaisonFour yolks beaten into the cream and stirred into the hot soup off the heat is what makes this a Windsor rather than a barley broth. It must not go above about 180F and must never boil, or the yolks scramble and the soup breaks into threads. Return it to the lowest possible heat, stir constantly, and stop as soon as it coats the spoon.
- Strain, then garnishWhite soups of this class were passed through a tammy or fine sieve before finishing. If you want visible barley in the bowl, cook a spoonful or two separately and add it after straining.
- StockThe list says only 'stock'; a light veal or chicken stock rather than beef is the likelier intention for a white soup of this kind. Commercial stock is usually salted and reduced, so season only at the end, after the cream has gone in.
- YieldSix as written; the stock and cream together come to some 55 fl oz before any reduction, so roughly 9 fl oz a head. It reheats badly once the yolks are in; make it to be eaten.
Windsor soup is one of those Victorian and Edwardian hotel-and-household names that covers two quite different things. The better-remembered version is brown Windsor, a dark meat soup thickened with flour, remembered as a byword for dull institutional catering in Britain -- though how widely it was actually cooked under that name in the period, as against being remembered and joked about later, is disputed. The version implied here, with pearl barley, double cream and a liaison of egg yolks, belongs to the white soups of the French-trained professional kitchen, closer to a puree or veloute than to anything brown. The name is generally traced to the royal residence rather than to any documented origin, and some older versions of the white sort used a calf's foot for body, with the barley doing similar work more cheaply. Its appearance as a bare ingredient list would fit a high-class cookery book written for students who had already been shown the method: the quantities were the part worth writing down.