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French White Soup
½ teaspoon thyme ½ teaspoon peppercorns ½ tablespoon salt 1 tablespoon lean raw ham, finely chopped 4 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 1 cup cream Yolks 2 eggs Wipe, clean, and disjoint fowl. Wipe veal, remove from bone, and cut in small pieces. Put meat, bone, and water in kettle, heat slowly to boiling-point, skim, and cook slowly four hours. Cook vegetables and ham in one tablespoon butter five minutes, add to soup with peppercorns and salt, and cook one hour. Strain, cool, and remove fat. Reheat three cups stock, thicken with remaining butter and flour cooked together, and just before serving add cream and egg yolks. Garnish with one-half cup cooked green peas and Chicken Custard cut in dice.
A classic white stock soup finished with a cream-and-yolk liaison. Everything depends on how the last two minutes are handled.
- The hinge: never boil after the yolks go inBeat the yolks with the cream, temper with a ladle of the hot soup, then stir the mixture back in off the heat. Anything above about 180F will scramble the yolks and leave the soup grainy.
- The fowl"Fowl" here means a mature stewing hen, which is what gives the four-hour simmer its body and gelatin. A supermarket broiler will fall apart in two hours and yield a thin stock; a 5 lb roasting chicken or, better, a few pounds of chicken backs and wings is the practical substitute.
- Veal for whitenessThe veal, and particularly the bone, is there for gelatin and pale colour rather than flavour. Do not brown any of the meat or vegetables, and keep the pot at a bare tremble so the stock stays clear.
- SaltA tablespoon and a half of salt is calibrated to a large kettle of stock that will be reduced and strained. Add half of it, taste after straining, and correct then.
- The rouxCook the remaining three tablespoons butter with the flour a minute or two without colour before adding the stock, or the soup will taste of raw flour. Three cups of stock to three tablespoons flour gives a light velouté consistency.
- Chicken CustardThis is the royale-type garnish given as a separate recipe elsewhere in the book: a seasoned chicken purée bound with egg, baked gently until just set and then cut into small dice. Follow that recipe's own directions for the baking; it can be made a day ahead.
- Skimming and coolingThe instruction to strain, cool and lift the fat is worth following. Chilling the stock thoroughly, even overnight, lets the fat come off in a sheet, which matters in a soup meant to be white.
- YieldThree cups of thickened stock plus cream and garnish serves four as a first course.
White soups are generally traced back to the eighteenth-century English and French kitchen, where a "soupe à la reine" or white soup is said to have been veal and fowl stock enriched with almonds, cream, or egg yolks and valued for its pallor. By the later nineteenth century the almonds had generally dropped away and the enrichment was a liaison of cream and yolks, the same technique used for a velouté. The dice of chicken custard corresponds to the French royale, a savoury baked custard cut into shapes and floated in clear or lightly thickened soups, given as a separate recipe, which would have allowed it to be drawn on for more than one soup.