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Artichoke Soup
3 good-sized French artichokes, 1 quart of milk, 3 level tablespoonfuls of flour, 2 tablespoonfuls of butter, Salt and pepper to taste.
Wash the artichokes, throw them into boiling water, boil forty-five minutes, take from the fire, drain, then pull them to pieces and press them through a purée sieve. Put the milk on to cook in a double boiler, add the artichoke to it. Rub the butter and flour together, stir into the hot milk, stirring continually until the milk thickens. Add the salt and pepper, cook ten minutes and serve with tiny chicken forcemeat balls floating in it.
CHICKEN FORCEMEAT BALLS: -Take four tablespoonfuls of chopped, uncooked chicken, add to it an equal amount IIO of stale bread crumbs. Add the white of one egg and a palatable seasoning of salt and pepper. Make this mixture into tiny balls, dropping each, as soon as made, into a kettle of boiling water. Simmer gently ten minutes. Lift with a skimmer and place in a soup tureen.
A straightforward cream soup built on a beurre manié rather than a roux. The only fussy part is the sieving, and the only real trap is the name of the vegetable.
- "French artichokes" means globe artichokesThe qualifier distinguishes them from Jerusalem artichokes (sunchokes), which were also common in this period and would give an entirely different soup. Use three large globe artichokes, roughly 3/4 to 1 lb each.
- What actually goes through the sieveAfter boiling, pull the heads apart, scrape the flesh from the base of each leaf, discard the fuzzy choke and the tough outer leaf tips, and press the hearts, bases and scraped pulp through a fine sieve or work them in a food processor and then sieve. A blender alone leaves fibrous threads.
- Boiling timeForty-five minutes is right for very large artichokes; test by pulling a leaf, which should come away with no resistance. Use a stainless or enamelled pot, not aluminium or cast iron, and add a squeeze of lemon to the water to keep the pulp from turning grey.
- A quart of milkFour cups. The finished soup is thin by modern standards; substituting a cup of the milk with cream or artichoke cooking liquid gives more body and more flavour respectively.
- The thickeningButter and flour rubbed together cold is beurre manié, whisked into hot liquid in small pieces. Three level tablespoons of flour to four cups of milk is a light bind. Because it goes in raw, the ten minutes of cooking afterward is not optional or the soup tastes of paste.
- Double boilerUsed here only to keep milk from scorching. A heavy-bottomed saucepan over low heat with regular stirring does the same job faster.
- The forcemeat ballsChopped raw chicken breast, an equal volume of dry breadcrumbs, and one egg white as binder. Make them no larger than a hazelnut so that ten minutes at a bare simmer brings them through to 165F; larger balls will still be raw at the centre.
- Stray textThe "IIO" mid-paragraph is the page number 110, picked up in transcription. It is not an ingredient.
- YieldFour to six as a first course.
This comes from the era when American cookery writers were teaching households to treat vegetables as the basis of a course rather than a garnish to meat, and cream soups were the standard vehicle. The insistence on "French" artichokes reflects a genuine confusion of the period: the globe artichoke, a Mediterranean thistle whose immature flower bud is eaten, shared its English name with the Jerusalem artichoke, an unrelated North American tuber, and cookbooks of the time routinely had to specify which was meant. Serving a clear or cream soup with small poached forcemeat balls floating in it, sometimes called quenelles, is a borrowing from French professional practice.