Chicken Soup
Put on the chickens with about three quarts water and some thin slices bacon. Let it boil well, then put in: A spoonful butter. 1 pint milk. 1 egg, well beaten. Pepper, salt, and celery or celery-seed or parsley. Let all boil up. Some dumplings made like biscuits are very nice in it.--Mrs. W.
Roast Veal and Chicken-bone Soup.
Boil the veal and chicken bones with vegetables, and add one handful macaroni, broken up fine. Boil the soup half an hour. Color with a little soy or catsup.--Mrs. S Chicken Soup.
Put on the fire a pot with two gallons water and a ham bone, if you have it; if not, some slices of good bacon. Boil this two hours, then put in the chickens and boil until done: add one-half pint milk and a little thickening; pepper and salt to the taste. After taking off the soup, put in a piece of butter size of an egg. Squirrel soup is good made the same way, but takes much longer for a squirrel to boil done.--Mrs. P. W.
Three related chicken soups printed as one entry, all built on the same idea: a long-boiled pork-and-poultry broth finished with milk. The quantities are generous for a nineteenth-century household and scale down without trouble.
- How many chickens"The chickens" is left unspecified; the first version uses three quarts of water, Mrs. P. W.'s two gallons. One 4-5 lb chicken in about 3 quarts of water gives a broth of comparable strength and serves six to eight.
- Boiling timeAn old stewing hen needed two hours or more; a supermarket bird is tender in 45 to 60 minutes and turns stringy well before the older timing is up. Pull the chicken out when the thigh meat loosens from the bone, strip it, and return the meat at the end.
- The milk is the hingeAdding a pint of milk to a hot salty broth and then letting it "boil up" risks curdling. Temper the milk with a ladle of hot broth first, add it off a hard boil, and hold the soup just below a simmer from then on.
- "A little thickening"This means flour slaked in cold water or milk. Roughly a tablespoon of flour per quart of soup, whisked smooth into cold liquid before it goes in.
- Bacon and ham bonePeriod bacon was dry-salt-cured side meat, considerably saltier and less sweet than modern streaky bacon, and a country ham bone saltier still. Salt the soup only at the very end, after the pork has given up what it will.
- Butter measures"A spoonful butter" is about a tablespoon; "a piece of butter size of an egg" is roughly 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. In the first version the butter goes in before the final boil; in Mrs. P. W.'s it is stirred in after the soup comes off the heat, for gloss rather than body.
- Celery seedFresh celery was seasonal, and the seed stood in for it year-round. It is far stronger than the stalk: a scant half teaspoon for a large pot, added late, or it turns bitter and medicinal.
- The dumplings"Made like biscuits" means a soft soda- or baking-powder dough dropped by the spoonful. Cook them covered on a bare simmer for about 15 minutes and do not lift the lid; a rolling boil breaks them apart.
- Soy or catsup for colorIn the veal-bone version the recipe calls for it to "color" the soup, though it seasons as well. Nineteenth-century catsups included mushroom and walnut as well as tomato, thin and dark; a teaspoon of soy sauce does the same job.
- SquirrelLegal to take and eat in much of the United States under game regulations, but not a market item. If you have one, it needs long moist cooking, as the recipe says.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered contributions from some 250 Virginia housewives, which is why the same dish appears three times over with three sets of initials attached and no attempt to reconcile them. The common thread here is pork: a ham bone or a few slices of bacon underpin many of the Virginia soups in the book, a habit of the upland South where cured hog was the one protein always in the house. The milk-and-butter finish marks these as a domestic soup rather than a company one, closer to a sick-room broth or a family supper than to the clear consommés of contemporary hotel cookery. The casual note that squirrel will do as well as chicken is a reminder that in 1879 Virginia, small game was ordinary household food and not a curiosity.