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Andalusian Soup
Simmer gently by the side of the fire three quarts of stock, prepared as for thick soup with clarified fish broth. Mix with one breakfast cupful of soubise puree the yolks of four eggs. Mix half a dozen tablespoonfuls of tomato sauce with one breakfast cupful of pike quenelle forcemeat, and season it with a little mild Spanish pepper. Shape it into quenelles and poach them. Add the soubise preparation with the soup, and stir it well; then skim off all the fat from the soup. Put the quenelles into a soup tureen, strain the soup over them, and serve with a dish of poached eggs.
A classical fish consommé enriched with a soubise-and-yolk liaison and garnished with pike quenelles. Everything hangs on the liaison: once the yolks go in, the soup must never boil.
- The hinge — do not boil after the yolksThe soubise-and-yolk mixture is a liaison. Temper it with a ladle of hot soup first, then stir it into the pot off the heat or over the barest flame, holding the soup below about 180F. A boil curdles the yolks and the soup turns grainy beyond rescue.
- "By the side of the fire"On a coal range this meant the cooler edge of the stovetop, where a pot sits well below a rolling boil; the recipe still calls it a gentle simmer. On a modern burner use the lowest setting, ideally with a heat diffuser.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, generally reckoned at 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Take it as a generous 1 cup and adjust; the exact figure is not critical for either the soubise or the forcemeat.
- Soubise pureeOnions sweated in butter without colour, cooked soft with rice or with béchamel, then passed through a sieve. Modern practice blends it, but pass it afterwards anyway — any onion fibre will show in a clear soup.
- Pike quenelle forcemeatPike is hard to buy; any lean white fish (pollock, haddock, walleye) pounded or processed with egg white and cream makes an equivalent panade-free mousseline. Poach the shaped quenelles in barely trembling salted water or fish stock for 6 to 8 minutes, not in the finished soup, where they would cloud it.
- Mild Spanish pepperSweet paprika, or a piquillo/pimiento puree — not chilli heat. Pimiento is commonly associated with dishes styled "andalouse."
- Clarified fish brothA fish consommé clarified with egg white and lean white fish. Keep the base fish stock to 20 or 25 minutes of cooking; long-simmered fish bones turn bitter and glue-like.
- SkimmingSkim thoroughly before the quenelles go in the tureen. Chilling the stock the day before and lifting the set fat off is easier than chasing it with a ladle.
- Yield and serviceThree quarts of stock, plus the additions, makes ten to twelve first-course servings. The poached eggs come to the table on a separate dish, as the recipe directs; poach them soft and hold them in warm, not hot, water.
The name follows the classical French system of garnishes rather than any Spanish original: an andalouse dish in a nineteenth-century kitchen generally meant tomato with sweet pimiento, and often rice or onion alongside he same andalouse, mayonnaise with tomato and pimiento. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the dining rooms at the Waldorf from its opening in 1893, compiled his 1896 book largely from the working repertoire of a hotel kitchen trained in that French vocabulary, and a dish of this kind is often traced to that source, which would explain why the instructions assume the reader already has stock, soubise and quenelle forcemeat standing by in a brigade kitchen. The layered construction here \a yolu liaison, poached quenelles, poached eggs served separately \is the American gilded-age hotel.