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Potage à la Reine
4 cups White Stock III ½ teaspoon peppercorns 1 stalk celery 1 slice onion 1/2 tablespoon salt Yolks 3" hard-boiled" eggs 1/3 cup cracker crumbs Breast meat from a boiled chicken 2 cups scalded milk 1/2 cup cold milk 3 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour Cook stock with seasonings twenty minutes. Rub yolks of eggs through sieve. Soak cracker crumbs in cold milk until soft; add to eggs. Chop meat and rub through sieve; add to egg and cracker mixture. Then pour milk on slowly, and add to strained stock; boil three minutes. Bind with butter and flour cooked together.
A late-Victorian cream-of-chicken soup built on sieved hard-cooked egg yolk and cracker crumbs rather than on a purée of raw meat. It works, but a few of Farmer's assumptions need translating.
- The hinge: sieve everything twiceThe whole character of the soup is its smoothness, and the original relies on rubbing yolks and cooked breast meat through a sieve by hand. A blender or food processor does the job faster; pass the result through a fine strainer anyway, since chicken breast that has already been boiled shreds into fibres rather than pulping.
- White Stock IIIFarmer's white stock is a light, deliberately unbrowned stock built on veal and/or fowl with vegetables and seasonings; check the book's own stock recipe for the exact makeup. Four cups of unsalted or lightly salted homemade chicken stock is the nearest equivalent; a dark or heavily reduced commercial stock will spoil the pale colour the name depends on.
- The saltHalf a tablespoon is 1½ teaspoons, which was reasonable for a wholly unsalted homemade stock. If your stock is already seasoned, start with a quarter of that and correct at the end.
- Cracker crumbsCommon crackers or plain soda crackers, unsalted or nearly so, crushed fine. Saltines will work if you cut the added salt further; anything sweetened or heavily seasoned will not.
- Scalded milkHeated to just below the boil, around 180F, with a shimmer and a ring of small bubbles at the edge. In 1896 this was partly a keeping measure for raw milk; with pasteurised milk it is simply a way to get the milk hot so it does not chill the soup or curdle against the hot stock.
- Binding with butter and flourCook the three tablespoons of each together for a minute or two without colouring, then whisk it into the simmering soup in small pieces and let it cook two or three minutes more so the flour loses its raw taste. Adding the roux cold and in one lump is the usual cause of lumps.
- Boil three minutesOnce the milk and the egg-yolk mixture are in, keep it at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil. Egg yolk and milk held at a hard boil will separate into grains, which no amount of straining afterwards will fix.
- YieldAbout six cups finished, serving six as a first course. It thickens noticeably as it stands; thin with hot stock or milk rather than water when reheating, and do not let it boil again.
Potage à la reine — queen's soup — is a white chicken potage thickened with pounded almonds, breadcrumbs or egg yolks. The name is traditionally attributed to Catherine de' Medici or to Marguerite de Valois, though both attributions are the kind of court legend that cookery writers repeat without evidence; what is documented is that a potage à la reine appears in French cookery books from the seventeenth century onward and remained a fixture of formal menus into the nineteenth. Its presence in Fannie Farmer's book reflects the Boston Cooking School's project of teaching American housekeepers the classical repertoire in reduced, teachable form: the pounded almonds are gone, and the sieved egg yolk and cracker crumbs do the thickening. The soup also shows the era's frugality — a bird already cooked for the table yields its breast to the next day's first course.