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Chicken Cream Soup
Cut up a medium-sized fowl into quarters, with a piece of ham and an onion and add about four quarts of water. Let this slowly boil until the meat will drop off the bones, then add a half cup of rice well washed, some chopped parsley, salt and pepper. When the rice is tender, take out the meat and add two cups of rich milk thickened with a little flour.
A stewed-fowl soup that builds its own stock as it goes. The only real technique is at the end, when the milk goes in.
- The hinge: the milkWhisk the flour into the cold milk first, then stir it into the simmering soup and hold it just below a boil for a few minutes to cook out the raw starch. A hard boil after the milk goes in risks curdling, and the salt the ham has given up makes that likelier.
- "A medium-sized fowl"In this period a fowl generally meant a mature hen past laying, commonly in the region of 4 to 5 lb, tough and deeply flavoured. A stewing hen from a butcher is the closest match; a supermarket roaster of the same weight works but will cook far faster and give a thinner broth.
- Cooking timeMeat dropping off the bones means 2 to 3 hours at a bare simmer for a stewing hen, 1 to 1 1/2 hours for a young bird. Keep it slow, as written, or the broth goes cloudy and greasy.
- Four quarts of waterThat is 16 cups, and a long slow simmer will reduce it substantially. You may well finish with something in the region of 2 1/2 to 3 quarts of soup after the rice and milk go in.
- The ham"A piece of ham" is the salt in this recipe as much as the seasoning. A 4 to 6 oz chunk of smoked ham or a ham hock is right. Salt only at the end, once you know how much the ham has given up.
- Skim and degreaseSkim the grey foam in the first twenty minutes, and lift the fat off the surface before the milk goes in. An old hen carries a good deal of fat, and it will not emulsify into a cream soup pleasantly.
- The riceHalf a cup of long-grain rice needs about 20 minutes and will keep swelling in the leftovers. Add the parsley in the last five minutes instead, so it stays green.
- The meatThe recipe takes the meat out and stops there. Skin and bone it, chop it, and return as much as you want to the pot; the rest is good in a salad or sandwich.
- YieldSix to eight servings as a first course, four as a supper dish with bread.
The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern and magazine publisher Butterick, and like many household manuals of its date it assumed a kitchen that started with a whole bird rather than parts. A boiling fowl was the end of a laying hen's useful life, and recipes like this one exist because such a bird is inedible roasted but excellent stewed for hours. The ham and onion are doing the work of a stock cube. Thickening the finished broth with milk and flour rather than cream marks it as an economical soup; "cream soup" in American books of this era regularly means milk with a flour binding, not cream at all.