White Soup
INGREDIENTS for soup for 8 to 10 persons. lb. of sweet almonds, 1/4 lb. of cold veal or poultry, 1 thick slice of stale bread, a little lemon-peel, 1 blade of mace, pounded, 3/4 pint of cream, the yolks of 2 hard-boiled eggs, 2 quarts of white stock. AVERAGE COST, 5d. per quart.
Reduce the almonds in a mortar to a paste, with a spoonful of water, and add to them the meat, which should be previously pounded with the bread. Beat all together, and add the lemon-peel, very finely chopped, and the mace. Pour the boiling stock on the whole, and simmer for an hour. Rub the eggs in the cream, put in the soup, bring it to a boil, and serve immediately.
TIME.-1½ hour.
SEASONABLE all the year.
Note. A more economical white soup may be made by using common veal stock, and thickening with rice, flour and milk; vermicelli may be served with it.
An almond-and-meat thickened soup of the old blanc-manger family, closer to a smooth potage than to a cream soup. It rewards a blender and punishes a hard boil at the end.
- The almond quantity is missingThe text reads "lb. of sweet almonds" with the fraction dropped in printing. The original as printed is genuinely ambiguous; judge the almonds against the 2 quarts of stock, bearing in mind the 1/4 lb. of meat printed beside them.
- Don't boil it at the endThe finish is an egg-and-cream liaison. The recipe says to bring it to a boil, but modern practice is to hold it just below a simmer, around 180F, stirring, until it thickens. Above that the yolks scramble and the soup turns grainy.
- Sweet almonds"Sweet" almonds are simply ordinary almonds, specified to distinguish them from bitter almonds, which were sold alongside them for flavouring. Use blanched (skinned) almonds or the soup will be freckled and grey.
- Mortar workA food processor replaces the pounding: grind the almonds with a spoonful of water to a paste, then add the cold veal or chicken and the crumb of the stale bread and process to a smooth mass. Keep it thick, not soupy.
- White stockA pale unroasted stock from veal bones or chicken, skimmed of fat and lightly seasoned. Any browning defeats the point, which is colour as much as flavour. Two quarts is about 2.3 litres.
- Blade of maceOne blade is a single flake of the lacy nutmeg husk, roughly a quarter teaspoon ground. Pound it as directed rather than steeping it whole, since the soup is not strained.
- Lemon-peelZest only, no white pith, and finely chopped so it disappears into the purée.
- Yield and textureTwo quarts serves 8 to 10 as a first course. Pass it through a fine sieve or blend before the liaison goes in if you want the smooth, opaque finish the recipe is aiming at; the almond and bread leave a slight grain otherwise.
White soup belongs to a long line of almond-thickened dishes running back through medieval European cookery, where pounded almonds stood in for dairy and gave the pale colour prized in grand food; the same technique produced blanc-manger. By the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it had become a fixture of the English ball supper, served hot from a tureen late in the evening, and it is the soup Bingley's ball is waiting on in Pride and Prejudice. Beeton's version keeps the almonds and the pounded cold meat but hangs them on a veal or poultry stock, and her note on a cheaper version thickened with rice, flour and milk shows the dish already sliding toward the plain cream-of-something soups that would replace it. The costing of 5d. a quart, and the assumption that a household has cold veal and a mortar to hand, place it squarely in the servant-keeping middle-class kitchen her book was written for.