Regency Soup
INGREDIENTS for soup for 8 persons. - The bones and remains of any cold game, such as of pheasants, partridges, &c.; 2 carrots, 2 small onions, REMOULADE. 1 head of celery, 1 turnip, 1/4 lb. of pearl barley, the yolks of 3 eggs, boiled hard, 1/4 pint of cream, salt to taste, 2½ quarts of medium or common stock. AVERAGE COST, exclusive of the cold game, 2s. 6d.
Place the bones or remains of game in the stewpan, with the vegetables sliced; pour over the stock, and simmer for 2 hours; skim off all the fat, and strain it.
Wash the barley and boil it in 2 or 3 waters before putting it to the soup; finish simmering in the soup, and when the barley is done, take out half, and pound the other half with the yolks of the eggs. When you have finished pounding, rub it through a clean tammy, add the cream, and salt if necessary; give one boil, and serve very hot, putting in the barley that was taken out first.
TIME.-2 hours.
SEASONABLE from September to March.
Remoulade, or French Salad- Dressing. INGREDIENTS for dressing for salad for 6 persons.-4 eggs, tablespoonful of made mustard, salt and cayenne to taste. 3 tablespoonfuls of olive oil, 1 tablespoonful of tarragon or plain vinegar. AVERAGE Cost, 7d.
Boil 3 eggs quite hard for about 1/4 hour, put them into cold water, and let them re- RHUBARB JAM.
Put all in a jar, which cover closely, and let it stand all night; then set it in a saucepan of water, and let it simmer till the isinglass and candy are dissolved.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A game-carcass soup thickened the old way, with pounded barley and hard-boiled yolks rather than flour. Note that the text as printed has run together with fragments of the neighbouring entries for Remoulade and Rhubarb Jam; only the first block belongs to Regency Soup.
- The hinge: two textures of barleyHalf the cooked barley is pounded smooth with the yolks to body the soup, half is held back whole and returned at the end. Skip the reserve and you get a uniform sludge; skip the pounding and you get thin broth with grains in it.
- TammyA tammy is a fine worsted straining cloth, worked with a wooden pestle to force purée through. A drum sieve, a fine chinois pressed with a ladle, or a blender followed by a fine strainer does the same job in a fraction of the time.
- StewpanA stewpan here is a wide, straight-sided saucepan, not a casserole dish. Any 4-5 litre heavy pot serves.
- Quantities2 quarts is a little over 2 litres of stock; 1/4 lb pearl barley is roughly 115 g; 1/4 pint cream is about 140-150 ml. "Medium or common stock" refer to the book's own graded stock recipes - a decent unsalted chicken or veal stock stands in.
- Blanching the barleyBoiling it "in 2 or 3 waters" first removes the starch and dusty flavour that would cloud the soup. Modern pearl barley is cleaner, but one change of water still pays.
- Game bonesPheasant and partridge carcasses are what this is for, and the recipe assumes cold, already-cooked birds; raw bones give a paler, flatter result. Duck, guinea fowl or a roast chicken frame will do, with the fat skimmed hard as instructed.
- The cream"Give one boil" after adding cream and egg-thickened purée is safe here because the yolks are already hard-cooked and cannot curdle in the way a raw liaison would. Keep it brief regardless - long boiling dulls the game flavour.
- SeasonableSeptember to March broadly covers the months when game, and leftover cold game, were about (partridge and pheasant shooting runs from September/October to the start of February), which is presumably why the recipe is bracketed that way. It is written for 8.
This is a salvage recipe: the point is to get a second meal from the carcasses of birds already served at table, and the cost is given "exclusive of the cold game" because that item is treated as waste. The name has nothing to do with the recipe's date - the book is mid-Victorian - and sits alongside other grand-sounding soup titles of the period, which seem to have been attached to fairly ordinary preparations to lend them tone. The technique is older than the name: thickening with pounded hard yolks and a grain, then rubbing the whole through a tammy, is common eighteenth-century practice, and predates the general reliance on a flour-and-butter roux in English soup-making. Pearl barley, hulled and polished, was cheap and widely stocked, and appears throughout Victorian cookery both as thickener and as filler.