Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Chicken Soup with Leeks
Chicken Soup with Leeks
Cut about a quarter of a chicken into slices; brown for ten minutes in a saucepan with an ounce of butter and half a chopped onion; moisten with three pints of consomme, and add three leeks cut in pieces, a garnished bunch of parsley, half a tablespoonful of salt and a teaspoonful of pepper. Serve after boiling thirty minute, and removing the parsley.
A brisk restaurant soup that assumes a stockpot of consommé already exists in the kitchen. The measurements are Oscar's shorthand for a line cook, and one of them needs tempering.
- Seasoning is heavy-handedSeasoning -- Half a tablespoon of salt for three pints is about conventional, but a full teaspoon of pepper is heavy, and either will be too much if the consomme is already seasoned. Add a pinch at the start and correct at the end.
- "A quarter of a chicken"Roughly 12 oz to 1 lb of bone-in bird from a 3-4 lb chicken. Thigh and leg meat holds up better over thirty minutes than breast, which will be dry and stringy by then.
- Three pintsSix cups, US measure. The finished soup serves four generously as a first course.
- ConsomméConsomme -- Clarified brown or white stock. A good unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute; boxed consomme is usually salted and will collide with the salt called for here.
- "A garnished bunch of parsley"Most likely a bouquet garni, parsley bundled with other herbs. Tie it with string so it lifts out in one piece as instructed.
- Wash the leeks properlySplit them lengthwise and rinse between the layers before slicing. Grit trapped in a leek does not settle out of a soup.
- The browning mattersTen minutes in butter with the onion is where the flavour of the finished soup comes from. Use a wide pan, do not crowd the chicken, and let it colour rather than steam.
- Thirty minutes is enoughLong enough to cook the chicken through and soften the leeks, short enough that the leeks keep some body. Pushing it further turns them to threads.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria from the 1890s, and his 1896 Cook Book reads like a working index of what a large hotel kitchen could produce on demand — entry after terse entry, most of them a single paragraph, all of them assuming a brigade with stock already made. Chicken and leek soup itself is far older than the hotel: the pairing runs through Northern European cookery, most famously in the Scottish cock-a-leekie. What marks this version as a restaurant recipe rather than a domestic one is the consommé, which a household would have had to make from scratch and which the Waldorf simply had on tap.