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CHAPTER XXXVI: Boil
Boil veal, carrots, turnips, onions, and a few sweet herbs to a good stock and strain it. Have ready the chickens, boiled tender and cut in pieces, cream and yolks of eggs beaten together; add these to the broth, heat them up together, and send it to table. A little minced parsley may be added just before serving.
Rabbit Soup (English recipe). 1 rabbit, 1 carrot, 1 head celery, 3 onions, 1 ounce peppercorns, 1 bunch herbs, 1 tablespoonful ground rice.
When the rabbit is skinned, take care to save all the blood. Cut in pieces and put into a dish with the water required for soup. Let it stand an hour; then add the blood of the rabbit, strain it through a sieve into a soup pot, and put all on the fire; stir constantly till it boils, to prevent its curdling, and skim it a little; put in carrot, celery, onions, peppercorns tied up in a bit of muslin, herbs, SOUPS salt, and chopped onion. Boil for three hours; take it off an hour before dinner; strain through a sieve; take out the onions, carrot, pepper, etc., and put in some of the best pieces of the rabbit; return it to the saucepan, and let it boil. Stir the ground rice dissolved in water into the soup; continue stirring till removed from the fire. Tomato Bouillon with Oysters. 1 can tomatoes, 1½ quarts brown stock, 1 chopped onion, bay leaf, 6 cloves, 1 teaspoonful peppercorns, 1 pint parboiled oysters, Pepper and salt, Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce.
Boil together the stock, tomatoes, bay leaf, cloves, tabasco and peppercorns. Cook twenty minutes.
Strain, cool and clear, then strain into cups over parboiled oysters.
When cooked, clear it as if you were making a plain, clear soup.
Beat the white of 1 egg lightly, just enough to separate it, and add to it the eggshell broken up. When the stock has cooled, add this and set it where it will come slowly to the boil, stirring constantly. The egg will attract all particles of tomatoes and everything solid. Let it boil two minutes, then strain through two thicknesses of cheese cloth. It will be perfectly clear, but with the redtomato coloring. If it were left to cool, it would become a solid jelly.- STELLA A. DOWNING.
Okra Gumbo (Southern recipe). 1 chicken, 1 onion, pod red pepper without the seeds, 2 pints okra, or about 50 pods, 2 slices ham, bay leaf, 1 sprig thyme or parsley, 1 tablespoonful each lard and butter, Salt and cayenne to taste.
Clean and cut up the chicken. Cut the ham into small squares or dice, and chop the onion, parsley, and thyme. Skin the tomatoes and chop fine, saving the juice. Wash and stem the okras and slice into thin layers of half an inch each. Put the lard and butter into the soup kettle; when hot, add the chicken and ham.
Cover closely and let it simmer ten minutes. Then add the chopped onions, parsley, thyme, and tomatoes, stirring frequently to prevent scorching. Add the okras, and when well browned, the juice of the tomatoes.
Four soups run together here: a white veal-and-chicken broth finished with cream and egg yolks, an English rabbit soup thickened with its own blood, a cleared tomato bouillon, and the opening of a Southern okra gumbo. Each has one point of technique that decides whether it works.
- The cream-and-yolk liaisonFor the first soup, temper the beaten cream and yolks with a ladle of hot broth before they go into the pot, and hold the finished soup below 180F. Once it boils the yolks scramble and no straining will recover the texture.
- Blood as a thickenerRabbit blood behaves like egg yolk: it sets into grains the moment it boils. The instruction to stir constantly until it boils is doing double duty here, and even so the soup is better held just under a simmer while the blood is going in.
- Handling wild rabbitIf the rabbit is wild rather than farmed, wear gloves while skinning and drawing it, and wash everything the blood touches. The three-hour boil is more than enough to make the meat safe; the risk is in the raw handling. Farmed rabbit, roughly 2 1/2 to 3 lb dressed, is what a butcher will usually supply.
- An ounce of peppercornsThat is roughly four tablespoons, enough to overwhelm a pot of rabbit soup. A teaspoon or two, tied in muslin as directed, is nearer modern taste; treat the printed weight as suspect rather than authoritative.
- Ground riceThis is rice milled to a gritty meal, coarser than rice flour and closer to semolina in texture, sold as ground rice. Slake the tablespoon in cold water to a thin cream before it goes in, or it will seize into lumps.
- Clearing with egg whiteThe bouillon must be cool, not warm, when the white and crushed shell go in, and it must come to the boil slowly and without further stirring once the raft begins to form. Break the raft and the cloudiness goes straight back into the cup.
- Parboiled oystersTwo minutes in their own liquor is the whole of it, just until the edges ruffle. The hot strained bouillon poured over them finishes the cooking; anything longer and they turn to rubber.
- Brown stock and TabascoBrown stock means beef or veal bones roasted before simmering, not a light poultry broth. The Tabasco is the same product still sold today; a dash means three or four drops in the two-odd quarts here.
- Browning the okraOkra needs to be cooked in the fat until it stops roping and takes colour, which can run to twenty minutes of patient stirring over medium heat. Adding the tomato juice too early stops the browning and locks in the sliminess.
- YieldThe rabbit soup and the gumbo each serve six to eight as a first course; the tomato bouillon, at roughly two quarts after clearing, fills eight to ten cups.
These four soups sit side by side as a fair picture of what an American household book of about 1900 expected of a soup course: a French-derived white soup bound with cream and yolks, an English game soup thickened with blood in a manner that goes back to medieval practice, a fashionable clear bouillon served in cups, and a Creole gumbo. Rabbit was still ordinary meat in both England and America, cheap and often shot rather than bought, which is why the recipe assumes the cook is skinning the animal and can catch the blood. The tomato bouillon is the newest of the group: canned tomatoes and bottled pepper sauce were both industrial products of the nineteenth century. Gumbo's name is generally traced to a West African word for okra, and the version given here is thickened with okra rather than with sassafras file, the other Louisiana method.