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Chicken Soup
Select an old fowl, pluck, singe and draw. Stuff it with a large lump of fat bacon, sew up the neck and vent, truss, flour it well, tie it up in a cloth and put it into a saucepan with sufficient warm water to almost cover; add one carrot cut in slices and two onions and a couple of cloves. Cover the pan over securely; allow the water to come slowly to a boil and then simmer for three hours or so according to the size and age of the bird. Take it out, remove the cloth, put the chicken into a bowl, cover it completely with any desired sauce and let it remain for a day. Break the fowl up in pieces, put back in the saucepan with the liquor; add one breakfast cupful of well-washed rice, a small turnip cut into pieces and a blade of mace and boil slowly for a couple of hours: rub as much as possible through a sieve, season to taste with salt and pepper.
Chicken Soup, Creole Style Prepare the same as for Chicken Soup, Holland style, adding half a chopped green pepper, one ounce of lean raw ham cut in small pieces and adding a sliced tomato to the soup five minutes before serving. Chicken Soup, Holland Style Cut about a quarter of a chicken in small pieces and slice half an onion; brown these well together for ten minutes in a saucepan with one ounce of butter and moisten with three pints of consomme; add three tablespoonsfuls of raw rice, half a tablespoonful of salt, a very little red pepper and a garnished bunch of parsley. After boiling thoroughly for twenty minutes, remove the parsley and serve.
Chicken Soup, Portuguese Style Prepare as for Chicken Soup, Holland Style, adding half a pint of finely chopped cooked vegetables five minutes before serving. Chicken Soup, Queen Style Take two fowls and a knuckle of veal and prepare a soup; strain it and put it back into the saucepan to boil. Cut off the fillets from two fowls in the meantime, and put them into a stewpan with a little butter and cook. Cut them up in small pieces and pound in a mortar, adding one ounce of rice boiled in broth, four ounces of breadcrumbs and a little salt. Put the whole into a saucepan with two tablespoonfuls of bechamel sauce and half a pint of fowl broth and stir over the fire with a wooden spoon until done, taking care that the liquor does not boil. Rub the whole through a fine sieve, warm it without boiling, and serve in a tureen with small pieces of toasted bread.
Five soups run together under one heading, and they are not in a logical order: the Creole and Portuguese versions both refer forward to the Holland style, which is printed after them. Read Holland first, since it is the quick base for two of the others; the unnamed opening recipe is a separate, much longer project.
- An old fowlA stewing hen — a laying bird past production, tough, fatty and deeply flavoured. Supermarket broilers are killed at roughly six to eight weeks and will fall apart long before three hours. Look for a boiling fowl at a halal or Chinese butcher, or accept that a 5 lb roaster needs about 90 minutes, not three hours.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is roughly 8 to 10 fl oz, so read it as one standard cup of raw rice. That is a great deal of rice for one bird's worth of liquor; expect a thick purée rather than a soup, and hold back stock to thin it.
- Blade of maceOne dried strip of the aril that wraps a nutmeg, warmer and lighter than ground mace. Whole blades are sold by spice merchants; a quarter teaspoon of ground mace is the nearest substitute, added late so it does not turn bitter.
- The day in sauceThe instruction to sauce the cooked fowl and leave it a day assumes a cold larder. Do it covered in the refrigerator. Cooked poultry held at room temperature for 24 hours can accumulate heat-stable bacterial toxins that the later two-hour boil will not destroy.
- Tying in a clothThe floured cloth keeps the bird whole and the broth clear, much like the pudding-cloth technique. Scalded muslin or cheesecloth works; leave it loose enough that water circulates, and skim the pot before the cloth goes grey.
- Consommé in the Holland styleThree pints of proper consommé is the whole flavour of that soup — with water or a weak stock it is just rice and onion. Twenty minutes may leave the rice a little firm; give it 25 to 30 if you want it soft, and remember rice keeps swelling in the tureen.
- Queen style must not boilThe hinge of the last recipe. The pounded fillet, breadcrumb and béchamel liaison will separate and go grainy the moment it reaches a simmer. Hold it at 170–180°F, stir with a wooden spoon, and reheat after sieving without letting a bubble break the surface.
- Sieving"Rub through a sieve" meant a tamis and a wooden mushroom, and a good deal of labour. A food mill on the fine plate, followed by a chinois, gives the same texture; a blender gives a smoother, slightly gluey result because of the rice.
- YieldNothing is stated. The Holland style on three pints of consommé serves six as a first course; the opening fowl-and-rice soup, sieved, makes about three quarts and will serve eight to ten.
Oscar Tschirky was never a chef — he was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, and the 1896 book that carries his name is essentially the house repertoire of a great New York hotel written down in bulk, which is why so many entries are compressed into strings of national variations. That is the logic of the classical kitchen: one mother preparation, then Creole, Holland, Portuguese, Queen, distinguished by a garnish added five minutes before service. The last of them is the oldest. Potage à la reine, a white purée of poultry breast thickened with rice, almonds or bread, appears in French court cookery long before Escoffier codified it, and is traditionally said to have been named for a French queen — Marguerite de Valois is the usual candidate, though the attribution is folklore rather than record. The opening recipe belongs to a different world altogether: an English boiled-fowl-in-a-cloth, stuffed with bacon for fat the old bird no longer had, eaten once as a dish and then broken up and boiled again into soup. Nothing was wasted, and nothing was hurried.