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Duchess Soup
Put two large, sliced onions into a saucepan with two tablespoonfuls of butter, and fry them for eight minutes. Sift in two tablespoonfuls of flour, and fry it for three minutes, stirring well to prevent its burning; then pour in slowly one quart of boiling milk, season to taste with pepper and salt, and stir over the fire for fifteen minutes. Strain the above mixture, put it back into the saucepan, add two tablespoonfuls of grated cheese, and place it over the fire. Beat three eggs, with a little salt and pepper, then pour them through a strainer into the soup. Move the saucepan to the side of the fire, and stir the contents for a few minutes. Turn the soup into a tureen, and serve it with a plate of sippets of toast.
A milk-based onion soup finished with cheese and beaten egg — closer to a thin velouté than to the brown onion soup of a Paris bistro. Everything hinges on the last ninety seconds.
- The egg is the hingeOnce the eggs go in, the soup must not simmer or it will scramble into threads. "Move the saucepan to the side of the fire" means shifting the pan to a cooler part of the range rather than over the direct heat; keep the soup below a simmer — somewhere around 170-180F — and stir until it thickens slightly, then serve.
- Boiling milk, added slowlyThe instruction to pour in boiling milk is explicit. Heating it separately and adding it in a thin stream to the hot roux, stirring throughout, helps keep the flour from seizing into lumps.
- Fry the flour, don't colour itThree minutes is enough to cook out the raw taste while keeping the roux blond. If it browns, the finished soup turns beige and takes on a nutty flavour that fights the cheese.
- Straining is not optionalThe onions are flavouring only and get discarded, which is why they can be sliced roughly. Press them firmly in the sieve to extract the liquid, and strain the beaten eggs as directed — it catches the stringy bits of white that would show up as specks.
- The cheeseThe recipe specifies only "grated cheese"; a hard cheese such as Parmesan or Gruyere would suit. Two tablespoons grated is a seasoning quantity, not a cheese soup — and since the recipe returns the pan to the fire after the cheese goes in, keep the heat gentle and stir so it melts rather than separating into oil.
- SippetsSmall triangles or narrow fingers of toast, crusts off, served alongside rather than floated. Cut them from a firm white loaf.
- YieldA quart of milk plus three eggs gives four modest first-course servings. It does not reheat well — the egg breaks — so make it to serve at once.
In classical French cookery the tag a la duchesse is often associated with an enrichment of egg, as in the piped duchesse potatoes bound with yolk and butter; a "Duchess" soup may follow the same logic, an ordinary onion-and-milk base lifted at the last moment with cheese and beaten egg. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maitre d'hotel whose name became shorthand for the Waldorf's dining rooms, published his enormous Cook Book in 1896. A soup like this had obvious appeal in a hotel kitchen: it uses no stock and costs almost nothing, though by the recipe's own timings it takes closer to half an hour than twenty minutes.