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CHAPTER XXXVI: Dash
Cock-a-Leekie (Scotch recipe). 1 fowl, 4 pounds beef, 12 leeks, Dash pepper, 1 tablespoonful salt, 5 quarts water.
Truss a fowl as for boiling, put it into a stewpan with a piece of lean beef, leeks cut in pieces an inch long, rejecting the coarser green part, a little pepper and salt, and water.
Cover the stewpan closely and allow its contents to stew slowly four hours; then place the fowl in a tureen; remove the beet, pour the soup and leeks over it, and serve.
Friar's Chicken (French recipe). 1 knuckle veal, 2 turnips, 2 carrots, 3 onions, 4 sprigs sweet herbs, 1 quart cream, 6 yolks eggs, 2 chickens.
Two entries run together here: a complete cock-a-leekie and the bare ingredient list for Friar's Chicken, whose method has been lost in the setting. The soup is workable as written; the second is a shopping list, not a recipe.
- The bird matters mostA "fowl" in this period is a mature laying hen, tough enough to hold together through four hours of slow stewing. (The 4 pounds in the ingredient list is the beef; no weight is given for the bird.) A modern supermarket chicken is likely to shred well before four hours are up; either use a stewing hen or boiling fowl, or pull the chicken out early and let the beef carry the remaining simmer.
- "Remove the beet"A typesetter's slip for beef. The 4 lb of lean beef is there for body and flavour, not for the tureen; it is lifted out and served separately or used cold.
- Slow means barely movingAim for the faintest tremble, well below a boil. A rolling boil over four hours will cloud the broth and shred the fowl. Note that the recipe itself directs the stewpan to be covered closely.
- LeeksTwelve leeks is a large quantity by modern sizing; the leeks behind this recipe may well have been slimmer than today's, in which case fewer fat supermarket ones would be closer. Discarding the coarse green tops is the recipe's own instruction, but the pale green is worth keeping for colour.
- SaltOne tablespoon in five quarts is a light hand for that much meat. Salt again at the end, once the liquid has reduced and you can taste what you actually have.
- YieldFive quarts of water yields roughly four after the long simmer: ten to twelve servings as a first course, with the fowl carved at the table.
- The missing prunesMany Scottish versions add stoned prunes towards the end of cooking. This recipe omits them, which is a legitimate variant, though some cooks regard their sweetness against the leeks as the point of the dish.
- Friar's Chicken is incompleteNo method is given. In the standard form the veal knuckle and vegetables make a broth, the jointed chickens are poached in it, and the yolks are beaten with the cream and stirred in off the heat. A quart of cream with six yolks will curdle instantly if it goes anywhere near a boil, so if you reconstruct it, temper and keep the pot below a simmer.
Cock-a-leekie is a Scottish national soup often said to have begun with the practice of stewing a bird past its fighting or laying days with the leeks that grew reliably through a northern winter. The name is literal: cock and leek. Prunes appear in a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century versions, and Scottish cookery writers argued about them well into the twentieth. Friar's Chicken, labelled "French" here, is in fact recorded as a Scottish dish in nineteenth-century Scottish cookbooks, a chicken broth thickened with beaten egg; the French attribution is the sort of loose culinary geography common in late Victorian compilations, where "French" often meant no more than "enriched with cream and egg yolks."