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Cheese Soup
Take one and one-half breakfast cupfuls of flour, one pint of rich cream, four tablespoonfuls each of butter and grated Parmesan cheese, a sprinkling of cayenne, two eggs, and three quarts of clear soup stock. Stir the flour, cream, butter, cheese, and pepper together in a basin, place this into another of hot water and mix until the whole forms a firm smooth paste. Break into it two eggs, mix quickly and thoroughly, and allow it to cook two minutes longer; then set it away to cool. When cold, roll into balls about the size of a walnut. When the balls are all formed drop them into boiling water and cook gently for about five minutes. Put them in a soup tureen, pour over the boiling stock and serve with a dish of finely-grated Parmesan cheese.
This is not a cream soup but a clear consommé garnished with poached cheese dumplings, and almost all the work is in the dumplings.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is generally reckoned somewhat larger than a modern measuring cup, commonly around 10 fluid ounces, though usage varied. One and one-half cupfuls of flour therefore falls somewhere between about 1 1/2 and 1 7/8 modern cups; expect to adjust, since the paste should be stiff enough to hold a shape, not pourable.
- The basin in hot waterThis is a double boiler. The paste is cooked over water, never on direct heat, which is what keeps the flour from scorching and the eggs from scrambling when they go in.
- The hinge: test one dumpling firstPoach a single ball before you shape the rest. If it disintegrates, work another spoonful or two of flour into the chilled paste; if it turns leaden, the paste was too dry. It is much easier to correct the paste before the whole batch is shaped and dropped in.
- Poach, do not boil"Boiling water" here means water brought to a boil and then held at a bare shiver. A rolling boil knocks the dumplings apart. Five minutes at a lazy simmer is right for walnut-sized balls.
- Chilling is not optionalThe paste must be thoroughly cold — an hour in the refrigerator — before rolling. Warm paste sticks to the hands and will not hold a sphere.
- ParmesanUse genuine Parmigiano-Reggiano or a good grana, grated fine on a rasp. Pre-grated tubs are too dry and salty and will make the paste gritty.
- The stock"Clear soup stock" means at minimum a stock strained, degreased and seasoned before it meets the dumplings; a properly clarified consommé is the ideal reading. Anything cloudy or fatty defeats the point of the dish, since the broth is the only liquid on the plate.
- YieldThree quarts of stock will serve roughly ten to twelve as a first course, and the paste makes a generous number of walnut-sized balls -- more than enough for several apiece. The quantities halve without difficulty.
Oscar Tschirky, ma tre d'h tel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, published his Cook Book in 1896, and this soup shows the German-Swiss and Italian strands that ran through hotel cookery of the period. Dumplings poached in clear broth were a fixture of Central European kitchens — K seklösschen, Griessnockerl, the whole family of soup garnishes that turn a plain consommé into a course worth charging for — while the Parmesan and cayenne belong to the Franco-Italian repertoire that grand hotels borrowed freely. Tschirky himself was born in Le Locle, in the Swiss Jura, and his book is a large general compilation, of which the relation to what the Waldorf's kitchens actually sent out is uncertain.