Duchess Soup
4 cups White Stock III 2 slices carrot, cut in cubes 2 slices onion 2 blades mace ½ cup grated mild cheese 1/3 cup butter 1/4 cup flour 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 2 cups scalded milk Cook vegetables three minutes in one and one-half tablespoons butter, then add stock and mace; boil fifteen minutes, strain, and add milk. Thicken with remaining butter and flour cooked together; add salt and pepper. Stir in cheese, and serve as soon as cheese is melted.
A cream-of-cheese soup built on the standard white stock of the Fannie Farmer kitchen. The whole thing succeeds or fails in the last thirty seconds.
- Cheese off the heatAdd the grated cheese with the pan pulled from the burner and stir only until it melts. Held at a simmer, the cheese proteins tighten and squeeze out fat, and the soup turns grainy with an oil slick on top.
- White Stock IIIA light, unbrowned stock from an earlier page of the book (the white stocks in this book are built on veal knuckle and/or fowl). A good unsalted chicken stock stands in; avoid dark or roasted stock, which muddies both the colour and the point of the dish.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed, sold whole as flat "blades" or ground. Two blades is somewhere in the region of a quarter to a half teaspoon of ground mace, depending on the size of the blades, but ground mace will not strain out, so add it sparingly at the end instead.
- Divide the butterThe 1/3 cup is used twice: 1 1/2 tablespoons to sweat the carrot and onion, the remainder (just under 4 tablespoons) cooked with the flour for the thickening. Cook that roux two or three minutes without colour before whisking it in.
- Mild cheeseA mild American cheese of the period means a young, fairly soft cheddar-type. A mild orange or white cheddar works; anything aged and crumbly will separate more readily, and pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch that dulls the texture.
- Scalded milkMilk was generally scalded to deal with enzymes and off-flavours in an unpasteurised supply. With modern milk it mainly serves to keep the soup hot when combined; heat it to steaming, not boiling.
- YieldSomewhere around five to six cups once the stock has boiled down, serving four to six. It thickens noticeably as it cools and will want thinning with a little extra stock if reheated, again gently.
Soups named for a duchess, like the potato-and-egg mixture called pommes duchesse, generally signal richness in the French kitchen vocabulary that American cookery schools borrowed in the late nineteenth century: cream, butter, a fine white stock, nothing coarse or brown. The recipe assumes the reader has already made White Stock III from an earlier page rather than opening a can. The cheese is the unusual element. Cheese soups appear only occasionally in genteel American cookery of the period, cheese more often turning up as a supper dish or a savoury course, and calling for a mild grating cheese rather than a sharp one keeps the soup within the delicate register the name promises.