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Cream of Rice
Cut about one and one-half pounds of loin of veal into small pieces, put them into a stewpan with two quarts of milk, and nearly a breakfast cupful of well-washed rice; add a small onion, and season to taste with pepper and salt. Let the whole simmer at the side of the fire until the meat is very tender and the rice reduced to a pulp. Strain the soup through a fine hair sieve, then return it to the saucepan; when boiling, move it to the side of the fire and stir in the yolks of two eggs that have been beaten up with the juice of a lemon and strained. Turn the soup into a tureen and serve it while very hot, accompanied, if desired, with a plate of sippets of toast or small croutons of bread that have been fried to a delicate brown in butter.
A veal-and-rice velvet soup thickened twice over: once by rice pushed through a sieve, once by an egg-and-lemon liaison. Nothing here is difficult, but the last minute decides whether it is silky or scrambled.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the beaten yolks and lemon juice go in, the soup must not boil again. Pull the pan off the heat, ladle a cup of hot soup into the yolks first to temper them, then stir that back in and hold the soup below 180F. Boiling will curdle it into threads, and the lemon acid makes curdling easier, not harder.
- "At the side of the fire"On a coal range the side of the fire was the gentle spot. On a modern hob this means the lowest steady setting, a bare tremble at the surface, for roughly 1 1/2 to 2 hours until the veal shreds and the rice has gone to mush.
- Milk over direct heatTwo quarts of milk with rice in it will catch and scorch. Use a heavy-bottomed pot, stir up from the base every ten minutes, and expect the milk to look grainy or separated during the long simmer; sieving corrects it.
- A breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, generally reckoned at 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so "nearly a breakfast cupful" of rice is about 1 cup of long-grain rice. Any plain white rice works, since it is being reduced to pulp anyway; avoid parboiled or converted rice, which resists breaking down.
- The sieveA hair sieve was a fine horsehair mesh. Use a fine chinois or a medium sieve and work the solids through with a ladle rather than draining them off. The point is to force the softened rice and some veal through into the liquid, not to clarify it. A blender pass before sieving makes this much faster.
- Loin of vealLoin is now an expensive cut wasted on a soup pot. Veal shoulder, breast, or a couple of veal shanks give more gelatin and better body; 1 1/2 lb boneless, or about 2 1/2 lb bone-in.
- SippetsSippets are small triangles or fingers of bread. Fried in butter to pale gold, they are a garnish passed at the table, not stirred in.
- YieldThe pot starts with two quarts of milk, but a long simmer and the loss of solids at the sieve mean the finished soup will be appreciably less than that; reckon on roughly six servings and check the volume rather than assuming it. Season again after sieving and after the liaison.
Cream soups of this kind, where a white meat is simmered with rice and then pushed through a sieve, belong to the older European kitchen that predates the reign of roux: rice, breadcrumbs and almonds all did the thickening before flour and butter took over, and dishes like potage à la reine worked on the same principle with poultry. The final liaison of egg yolks with lemon juice is the same technique that carries Greek avgolemono and old English white soups, and it appears repeatedly in nineteenth-century English cookery books, whose phrasing this recipe closely follows. Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) was compiled at a moment when the Waldorf dining rooms served a French-inflected menu to New Yorkers who still recognized these plainer Anglo-American formulas; veal was a favoured meat for dishes meant to be pale and delicate.