White Soup
5 cups White Stock III ½ tablespoon salt ½ teaspoon peppercorns 1 slice onion 1 stalk celery 2 cups scalded milk 3 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons flour Yolks 2 eggs Salt and pepper Add seasonings to stock, and simmer thirty minutes: strain, and thicken with butter and flour cooked together; add scalded milk. Dilute eggs, slightly beaten, with hot soup, and add to remaining soup; strain, and season with salt and pepper. Serve at once or soup will have a curdled appearance. 6 cups White Stock III
A classic velouté finished with an egg-yolk liaison. Everything depends on the last minute, when the yolks go in and the heat must come down.
- The hinge: never boil after the yolksOnce the tempered yolks are stirred into the pot, keep the soup below a simmer — around 170-180F. A boil scrambles the yolk into visible flecks, which is exactly the "curdled appearance" the recipe warns against.
- Tempering, in practiceBeat the yolks lightly, then ladle in a cup of the hot soup in a thin stream while whisking before returning the mixture to the pot. Adding cold yolks straight to five cups of hot liquid will set them instantly.
- White Stock IIIA white stock is one simmered without browning the meat or bones, typically veal and/or fowl; the exact formula is given earlier in the book, not here. A good unsalted chicken stock, or half chicken and half veal, gives the same pale body. Homemade or low-sodium is important here given the amount of salt called for.
- The salt looks wrongThe salt looks heavy -- A tablespoon and a half of salt against the five cups of stock (about seven cups of finished soup) comes to roughly twice what most palates want, and the recipe salts again at the end. Season lightly at the start and adjust at the finish.
- Scalded milkHeated to just below boiling, when bubbles ring the edge of the pan. With pasteurized milk this is no longer necessary for keeping quality, but warming it still keeps the roux-thickened base from seizing or dropping in temperature.
- Butter and flour cooked togetherA white roux — cook the three tablespoons butter with four of flour for two or three minutes over low heat so the raw-flour taste goes, but do not let it take any color. Whisk the strained hot stock in gradually.
- The two strainingsThe first removes peppercorns, onion and celery. The second, after the yolks, catches any chalazae or partly set egg and is what gives the soup its smooth finish. Do not skip it.
- Yield and serviceAbout seven cups of finished soup; the recipe gives no serving count. It is meant to go to the table immediately, as the recipe says; holding it warm for any length of time will separate the liaison.
White soups — pale, thickened, milk- or cream-enriched, and finished with egg yolks — are generally traced to the family of dishes that eighteenth-century English cookbooks called by the French name *soupe à la reine*, which used a light veal or fowl stock deliberately kept free of any browning. The pallor was the point: a well-made white soup showed a kitchen that could keep a stock from coloring and a liaison from breaking. Its placement among a run of stock-based soups, each keyed to a numbered master stock earlier in the chapter, is often said to reflect the systematic method associated with the Boston Cooking School: learn the stocks, then learn the variations built on them. The egg-yolk liaison is one of the oldest thickeners in European cookery — this recipe uses both it and a flour-and-butter roux, which is why it needs handling at the end.