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Chicken Soup with Wine
3 lb. fowl 1 onion, sliced 2 quarts cold water 2 stalks celery 2 slices carrot Bit of bay leaf 1 tablespoon salt 2 tablespoons Sauterne wine 1/2 teaspoon peppercorns 1 cup cream Wipe and cut up fowl. 1 teaspoon beef extract Cover with water, and add carrot, salt, peppercorns, onion, celery, and bay leaf. Bring
A clear fowl broth finished with cream and a little white wine — the sort of soup that depends entirely on a long, low simmer and a late, gentle finish. Note that the text as printed breaks off mid-sentence at "Bring"; the standard method is to bring slowly to the boil and simmer, covered, until the meat falls from the bone, then strain, and add the beef extract, wine and cream off the heat.
- "Fowl" is not a broilerA 3 lb fowl means an older laying hen, sold today as a stewing hen or soup hen. It has the collagen and flavour a supermarket roasting chicken lacks; the printed text breaks off before any timing is given, but a mature bird wants a long simmer, and a young roasting chicken will need considerably less and will give a thinner broth.
- The hinge: cream goes in last, off the heatAdd the cup of cream after the broth is strained and no longer boiling. Cream boiled hard in a salted, wine-touched liquid can separate, and a broken soup is difficult to recover.
- Sauterne, not SauternesThe spelling without the final "s" was commonly used in American books for a white table wine rather than the sweet Bordeaux of Sauternes, though American "Sauterne" was not always dry. A dry white will serve; two tablespoons is a seasoning, added at the end.
- Beef extractA concentrated meat extract such as Bovril, or a modern beef base. One teaspoon is enough to deepen the colour and savour; more will overwhelm the chicken.
- SaltA full tablespoon into two quarts is roughly right for a broth that will be reduced and diluted with cream, but modern beef extract is already very salty. Add half at the start and correct at the end.
- SkimmingBring the pot up slowly and skim the scum as it rises; a hard boil clouds a broth. The printed text gives no instruction on this point.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; two quarts of water simmered down and strained, plus the cup of cream, should give somewhere near seven cups. Chill the strained broth and lift the fat before finishing if you want it clean-tasting.
The recipe belongs to a period when a stewing hen was a cheap, standard purchase — a hen past laying was worth more in the stockpot than on the perch. The beef extract is a distinctly turn-of-the-century touch. Commercial meat extracts, developed in the mid-nineteenth century and widely marketed by the 1890s, gave home cooks a shortcut to the deep savour that had previously required a separate beef stock.