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Pepper (Cut finely leaves)
Cut finely leaves of watercress; cook five minutes in two tablespoons butter, add stock, and boil five minutes. Thicken with butter and flour cooked together, add salt and pepper. Just before serving, add milk and egg yolk, slightly beaten. Serve with slices of French bread, browned in oven.
A fragment of a watercress soup, printed without a quantity list — the title itself is a scrap of an index line. Everything but the butter has to be scaled by judgment.
- ProportionsNothing is quantified except the two tablespoons of butter. A workable reading for four servings is two large bunches of watercress (about 6 oz trimmed), 1 quart stock, and roughly 1/2 cup milk with one yolk. The original genuinely does not say, so treat any figure as a reconstruction.
- Thickening"Butter and flour cooked together" is a roux — equal weights, cooked a minute or two without colouring, then whisked into the simmering stock. For a quart of soup use about 2 tablespoons each; more than that and it reads as sauce.
- The hinge: the yolkOnce the yolk goes in the soup must not boil, or it will curdle into threads. Temper it by whisking a ladle of hot soup into the beaten yolk and milk, return the mixture to the pot off the heat, and serve at once.
- Watercress timingFive minutes in butter and five more in stock is enough to strip the pepperiness and dull the colour. Modern practice is to sweat the leaves a minute at most, or hold back half and add them at the end for bite and green colour.
- Stems and leavesThe recipe specifies leaves. Watercress stems are tough and can be stringy; save them for stock or chop them fine and give them the longer cooking, adding the leaves late.
- StockThe recipe assumes a plain household stock rather than a seasoned commercial one, and gives no detail about it. Modern commercial broth is saltier, so season after the roux and again at the end rather than before.
- French bread croutonsThe original says only 'browned in oven,' with no temperature or time. Thin slices in a moderate oven, turning once, will do it; they can be made hours ahead, and a light brushing of butter helps them colour.
- ServingRich enough with butter, roux and yolk to serve in small cups as a first course — the quantities above give four moderate bowls or six cups.
Watercress soup belongs to a family of nineteenth-century "green" soups — sorrel, spinach, lettuce, cress — that let a cook put something fresh on the table in early spring, when watercress grew wild in running water long before it was a supermarket crop. The finishing of a soup with egg yolk and cream or milk is the old French *liaison*, a standard technique in the American cooking-school tradition, which taught French-derived building blocks — roux, stock, liaison — rather than fixed dishes. That may also be why this entry reads so telegraphically: where a master soup had already been set out at length, variants could be printed in a few lines with quantities assumed. The mangled heading appears to be a transcription artifact rather than part of the recipe.