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CHAPTER XXXVI: Place
Place a saucepan, with butter and fine-chopped onion, over the fire; SOUPS cook five minutes; add bay leaf, peppers, ham, and flour; stir and cook two minutes; add the tomatoes; stir and cook five minutes; add salt, stock, and tabasco; cook ten minutes, then press the soup through a sieve and serve with toasted bread cut into dice.
Soup à la Reine (French recipe). 1 fowl, Small knuckle veal, 4 quarts cold water, 1 tablespoonful salt, 2 leeks, 2 onions, 3 sprigs parsley, 2 blades mace, 4 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 pint cream, Yolks 4 eggs.
Place in a soup kettle the fowl, cut up knuckle of veal, and cold water; as soon as it boils, add salt, leeks, onions, parsley, and mace; cover and boil slowly; when the chicken is done, take it out, remove the meat, chop the bones, return them with the skin to the soup kettle and boil half an hour longer. Strain through a sieve, remove the fat, return 2½ quarts soup to the kettle and place it over the fire; melt butter in a saucepan, add flour, stir until the flour has absorbed all the butter; pour in slowly 1 pint stock, and stir until smooth; then add it to the soup; boil fifteen minutes; mix the yolks of 4 eggs with 1 pint cream; season to taste with salt; draw the soup kettle to side of stove; add a little of the soup to the cream and yolks; mix well; then pour it into the soup; place the finecut chicken meat from the breast in tureen, pour the soup over, and serve.
Two recipes have run together here: the closing lines of a tomato soup, then Soup à la Reine in full. The hinge in the second is the egg-and-cream liaison, which must never see a boil.
- The liaison is the whole dishOnce the yolks and cream go in, keep the soup below about 175F and never let it return to a boil, or it will curdle into threads. "Draw the soup kettle to side of stove" means move it off direct heat; on a modern range, take the pan off the burner entirely, temper a ladle of hot soup into the yolk-cream mixture, then stir it back.
- Flour is missing from the listThe ingredients name 4 tablespoons butter but no flour, though the method calls for it. Use an equal measure, 4 tablespoons, for a roux that will lightly thicken 2½ quarts of stock.
- A fowl is not a broiler"Fowl" meant an old laying hen, tough but deeply flavoured. A 4-5 lb stewing hen is the closest thing; if you can only get a roasting chicken, simmer it gently and pull it out after about an hour so the breast stays worth slicing.
- Knuckle of vealThis is the joint end of the shank, sold now as veal shank or osso buco cut. It is there for gelatin, not meat, and gives the finished soup its body. Ask a butcher to saw it into two or three pieces.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed; a "blade" is one piece of that aril. Conversions vary, but two blades are somewhere in the region of ¼ to ½ teaspoon ground mace; whole blades have the advantage of being lifted or strained out with the aromatics, as powder will not be.
- Simmer, not boil"Cover and boil slowly" means a bare simmer with the surface barely moving. A hard boil emulsifies the fat and clouds the stock, and this soup is supposed to be pale and smooth.
- Degreasing"Remove the fat" is far easier if the strained stock is chilled overnight, when the fat sets in a cap you can lift off. Skimming hot stock with a spoon leaves a good deal behind.
- YieldNeither recipe says. The 2½ quarts of finished soup, enriched with a pint of cream, serves eight to ten as a first course.
Soup à la Reine — "the queen's soup" — belongs to a family of white poultry potages that French cookery had codified long before this book appeared, the name traditionally traced to the court of the Valois and often attributed in older cookbooks to Marguerite de Valois, though this is tradition rather than record. By the nineteenth century it meant a clear chicken and veal stock finished with a roux and a liaison of egg yolks and cream, with shredded breast meat laid in the tureen. The technique is what dates it: an American household manual could print "French recipe" as a mark of standing, and the labour assumed here — a whole fowl and a veal knuckle simmered down for a single course, the bones returned to the pot for a further half hour — reflects a kitchen where stock was made continuously rather than bought. The stray opening lines, with their ham, bay leaf and tabasco pressed through a sieve, are the end of a tomato soup from the preceding page, a reminder that these compendia left little room between recipes.