Chicken Soup
Time, four hours. Boil two chickens with great care, skimming constantly, and keeping them covered with water.
When tender, take out the chickens and remove every bone from the meat; put a large piece of butter into a frying-pan large piece of butter into a frying-pan and sprinkle the chicken meat well with flour, lay in the hot pan; fry a nice and keep it hot and dry. Take a pint of the chicken water and stir in two large spoonfuls of curry powder, two of butter and one of rice flour, one teaspoonful of salt and a little cayenne; mix it with the broth in the pot; when well mixed, simmer five minutes, then add the browned chicken. Serve with rice
This is a curried chicken soup in the mulligatawny line, built in two stages: a long-simmered broth and a floured, fried chicken garnish added at the end. The text has a compositor's slip — "large piece of butter into a frying-pan" is set twice — and the word after "fry a nice" (almost certainly "brown") has dropped out.
- The hinge: do not boil the birds"Boil" here means what we would call a bare simmer, with the surface barely trembling. A rolling boil emulsifies fat into the broth, clouds it, and shreds the meat before it is tender.
- Two chickens, and what sizeA fowl for soup in this period was typically an older, tougher bird than a modern broiler, and the four hours assumes it. Two supermarket chickens will be tender in something like 1 to 1½ hours rather than four; pull the meat then and let the bones and carcass keep simmering for the rest of the time to build the broth.
- SkimmingThe constant skimming called for early on is for grey protein scum, not fat. Skim the fat after the broth has settled, or chill it and lift the cap.
- "Two large spoonfuls"Read this as tablespoons, so roughly 2 tablespoons curry powder and 2 of butter to a pint of broth. That is a strongly spiced liaison meant to season the whole pot, not a pint of finished soup.
- Bloom the curry powderMelt the butter, stir the curry powder and rice flour into it and cook for a minute or two before adding the pint of broth. Raw curry powder stirred straight into liquid tastes dusty and slightly bitter.
- Rice flourSold as rice flour still, in Asian groceries and many supermarkets. It thickens more lightly than wheat flour; cornstarch is a workable substitute if you cannot find it.
- Timing at the endThe five-minute simmer is enough to cook out the starch. Add the fried chicken only at the very end and serve at once, or the crisp floured surface softens back into the broth.
- Salt and yieldOne teaspoon of salt is for the pint of thickening liquid; the full pot of broth will need considerably more, added by taste at the end. The recipe gives no yield; two chickens with rice alongside should serve eight or so.
This is something close to mulligatawny — the Anglo-Indian soup whose title is generally traced to Tamil words for pepper water, brought back to Britain by East India Company households and absorbed into English and American cookery through the nineteenth century. By the time it reached a book like this one, the dish had been thoroughly domesticated: commercial curry powder from a tin, butter and rice flour instead of a fresh spice paste, and boiled rice served alongside rather than in the bowl.