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Pepper (Cook onion five minutes)
Cook onion five minutes in butter, add lettuce, rice, and stock. Cook until rice is soft, then add cream, yolk of egg slightly beaten, nutmeg, salt, and pepper. Remove outer leaves from lettuce, using only tender part for soup.
This is the method half of a cream of lettuce soup; the ingredient list that would have sat above it has not carried over, so quantities must be judged rather than followed. The technique itself is straightforward and the proportions are forgiving.
- The missing quantitiesNo amounts survive in this excerpt, so any figures given here would be invented. For a soup of this type, roughly a quart of stock, a small onion, a tablespoon of butter, two or three tablespoons of rice, a head of lettuce and half a cup of cream with one yolk will behave correctly; adjust rather than treat as gospel.
- The hinge: the yolk must not boilOnce the beaten yolk goes in, the soup can never return to a simmer or it will curdle into threads. Take the pan off the heat, temper the yolk with a ladle of hot soup, stir it back in and hold the soup below about 180F.
- Sweat, do not brownFive minutes in butter means softening the onion until translucent. Colour on the onion will darken a soup that is meant to stay pale green.
- Lettuce choiceThe recipe's instruction to discard the outer leaves suggests a heading lettuce rather than a loose-leaf one, though no variety is named. A butterhead or Boston type suits it; romaine hearts work; crisphead varieties give less flavour.
- Rice and textureCooking the rice to softness in the stock is what thickens this soup; the starch does the work of a roux. Long-grain rice stays more distinct, short-grain or Arborio breaks down and gives a smoother body.
- When to add the lettuceFollow the order as written but keep the lettuce time short in practice — shredded tender leaves need only a few minutes at the end of the rice's cooking. Long boiling turns them olive-drab and slightly bitter.
- NutmegNo quantity is given. Grate it fresh and use a scant pinch; nutmeg easily overwhelms a delicate lettuce soup.
- YieldA quart of stock made this way serves four as a first course. It does not reheat well once the yolk is in; make only what will be eaten.
Cream soups built on a base of stock, a starch and a finish of cream and egg yolk are the backbone of the nineteenth-century soup repertoire, and they reflect a debt to French bourgeois cookery filtered through New England teaching kitchens. Lettuce soup in particular belongs to a thrifty tradition of using up produce that has begun to go over and would otherwise have gone to the stockpot or the chickens, and a head of lettuce past its salad prime found its way into the saucepan rather than the bin. The liaison of egg yolk and cream stirred in off the heat is a classical French technique; it thickens and enriches without flour.