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CHAPTER XXXVI: Take
Take 6 heads celery, 3 onions, 2 turnips, and 4 carrots; put them into a stewpan with 1 pound lentils, a slice of ham, 4 tablespoonfuls butter; set it upon a stove to stew slowly for an hour, then add 2 quarts stock; let it stew for two hours; strain the soup into a dish, rub vegetables through a sieve; put again in the stewpan with salt and pepper; let it simmer for quarter of an hour longer, and serve.
Chicken Soup.
Carcass roast chicken, 2 quarts cold water, 1 pound lean veal, 2 tablespoonfuls chopped bacon, 1 bay leaf, 1 slice onion, 1 stalk celery, 2 tablespoonfuls cornstarch, 1½ teaspoonfuls salt, ¼ teaspoonful pepper, 1 tablespoonful flour, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, Yolks 2 eggs, 1 cupful cream.
Slice the best meat from fowl, leaving only wings and carcass, with skin removed from meat as well.
Break bones, put them into the soup kettle with cold water and the uncooked neck and feet, scalded and cleaned. Cut veal in dice, dust with flour and pepper, and brown in finely chopped bacon; add 1 cupful hot water, simmer for a few minutes, cool, and pour into the soup kettle.
Cook slowly for one hour, then add bay leaf, onion, and celery; cook half an hour longer, strain, and cool.
Mix together in a saucepan cornstarch, salt, pepper, flour, and butter. Add gradually 1 pint hot stock and cook until thickened, then add 1½ cupfuls hot stock, mix well and add yolks of eggs beaten and diluted with cream. Do not boil after egg is added, but keep hot until egg has thickened. Serve in bouillon cups, with or without a spoonful of whipped cream on top of each.
Mullagatawny Soup. 3 quarts chicken stock, 4 onions, 1 carrot, 2 turnips, 6 stalks celery, 1 tablespoonful curry powder.
Chop the vegetables, add to the stock, and put them in a saucepan over a hot fire until it begins to boil, then set aside to simmer for twenty minutes. Add curry powder and flour. Mix well, boil three minutes, and strain. In serving, add some pieces of the white meat of the chicken chopped.
Soup à la Flamande (French recipe).
Take 2 quarts veal stock, put in 1 cupful cooked spinach and 1 cupful sorrel, and let it boil till tender; season with salt and while it is boiling, but about two minutes before serving stir into it a pint of cream previously mixed with the yolks of 2 eggs.
Four soups run together in one block, the first without a title — it is a lentil and root vegetable purée. All four are built the same way: long extraction, then either a sieve or an egg-and-cream liaison to finish.
- The hinge: never boil the liaisonBoth the chicken soup and the Soup à la Flamande finish with egg yolks beaten into cream. Hold the pot below a simmer, around 170–180F, and stir until it coats a spoon; a single boil curdles the yolks into threads and cannot be undone.
- Stewpan and soup kettleA stewpan is a wide, straight-sided saucepan. For the lentil soup you need a large pot: a pound of lentils, 2 quarts of stock and that quantity of celery and roots want 8 quarts or more. The soup kettle wants at least 6 quarts to hold 2 quarts of water plus a chicken carcass and bones.
- "Six heads celery"A head here is roughly what a supermarket sells as a bunch, though celery of the period was commonly blanched by trenching and may have run smaller. Three or four modern bunches, trimmed, is probably nearer the intended volume; the leaves can go in too.
- Rubbing through a sieveThe instruction to strain, then push the vegetables through a sieve, is the old route to a purée. A food mill on the medium plate does it faster and keeps the lentil skins out; a blender works but gives a slicker, less rustic body.
- Necks and feetScalded chicken feet are rich in gelatin and give the stock body. Look for them at Asian and Latin markets, or ask a butcher. Without them, add a split wing or two.
- The missing flour in the mulligatawnyThe method says "add curry powder and flour" but no flour appears in the ingredient list. Roughly 2 tablespoons, cooked briefly in butter or slaked with cold stock before it goes in, matches the intended thickness.
- Curry powder was milder thenOne tablespoon to 3 quarts of stock is very restrained by current taste. Bloom the powder in a little butter first and expect to add more; taste after the three-minute boil.
- SorrelA cupful of cooked sorrel is hard to find outside farmers' markets and gardens; it collapses to almost nothing raw, so start with a large bunch. Its sharpness is the point of the soup — spinach alone gives you no acidity, so a squeeze of lemon stands in poorly but stands in.
- YieldThe lentil soup and the mulligatawny each give 8 to 10 generous servings. The chicken soup, served the way the book intends in bouillon cups, stretches to 8 small portions rather than 4 bowls.
Mulligatawny is the outlier in this group and the one with a traceable route: the name is generally derived from Tamil words for pepper water (milagu thanni), the thin, sour, spiced broth of southern India, which British households in Madras thickened with stock, rice, and flour until it became a curried soup rather than a seasoned water. By the time it reached American household compendiums like this one it had lost the rice, the tamarind, and most of the heat, and survived mainly as a way to use up chicken stock and a tin of curry powder. The other three soups here show the ordinary logic of a period kitchen: nothing is wasted. A roast chicken's carcass, neck, and feet become the next day's consommé; lentils and root vegetables carry a single slice of ham a long way; and the egg-and-cream liaison, borrowed straight from French practice, turns a thin broth into something that could be sent to table in cups before dinner.