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Egg Soup
1½ pints (3 cups) water Salt and pepper 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley Toast points Chop the onion and fry it for a few minutes in the butter, stir in the flour, cook a minute, then add the water, bring to boiling point, and season with parsley, salt, and pepper.
Beat up the yolks of the eggs, add them off the fire, stirring till all is mixed.
Have the toast points in petites marmites, pour in the soup, and serve as quickly as possible.
A thin onion veloute finished with egg yolks — the whole thing takes about fifteen minutes, and the only difficult moment is the last one. Note that the ingredient list as printed is damaged: the quantities of onion, butter, flour and eggs are missing from the original page.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the water (3 cups), parsley and seasoning survive in the printed list. For a soup of this type the usual proportions would be one onion, a tablespoon each of butter and flour, and two or three yolks, but the book does not say so and the figures should be treated as absent rather than known.
- "1/2 pints (3 cups)"Three cups is a pint and a half, so the line is almost certainly a broken 1 1/2 pints. Trust the cup figure.
- The hinge: the yolks must not boilAdd the beaten yolks off the heat and do not return the pan to the burner. Egg yolk sets from about 150F; a soup that goes back to a simmer turns to fine curds and cannot be brought back.
- Temper firstWhisk a ladle of the hot soup into the yolks before stirring them into the pot. Poured in cold and all at once, they set on contact with the hot liquid.
- Cook the flour, but keep it paleA minute in the butter is enough to lose the raw taste; this soup should stay blond, not brown. The roux is there for body only — the finished soup is thin.
- Petites marmitesSmall individual lidded earthenware pots, the point being that they hold heat while the soup travels to the table. Any warmed ovenproof cup or small bowl does the same work; warm them first, or the soup cools below serving temperature immediately.
- Toast pointsCrustless toast cut corner to corner into triangles, laid in the bowl before the soup goes in. Cut them thick and toast them hard or they dissolve before the bowl reaches the table.
- YieldThree cups of liquid serves three as a first course, or two generously. It does not keep or reheat — the yolk liaison breaks on a second heating.
Finishing a soup with beaten egg yolks off the fire is a long-established thickening method in European cookery, older than roux, and survives in French liaison and Greek avgolemono. This version is essentially a cheap household soup: onion, flour, water and eggs, with no stock at all, dressed up for the table by the serving vessel rather than the ingredients. The petite marmite — the little pot the soup is poured into — was associated with French service of the period.