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Princess Soup
Separate the meat from the bones of a cold roasted fowl, chop the meat, place it in a mortar, and pound it well. Put the bones and trimmings of the fowl into a saucepan with one pint of boiling veal stock, and boil for half an hour. Peel and cut into slices four large cucumbers; put one-fourth pound of butter in a stewpan to melt; then put in two or three sliced onions, one-half pound of lean ham, one or two sprigs of basil, two bay leaves and the sliced cucumbers. Fry them over a brisk fire for a few minutes, then pour in one pint of broth, and let it simmer for half an hour; add the pounded fowl, four tablespoonfuls of sago, and four tablespoonfuls of flour, and stir until well mixed; pour in the broth from the chicken bones, and boil the whole gently for twenty minutes. Pass the soup through a fine hair sieve into another stewpan, and stir it over the fire until boiling; pour in one quart of boiling milk, skim it, and season with salt and one teaspoonful of sugar. Put the slices of cucumbers into a soup tureen with one-half pint of boiled green peas and one teacupful of thick cream, pour in the soup, stir until well mixed, and then serve it. Should the soup be too thick, add a little more milk of broth before turning it into the tureen.
A late-Victorian hotel soup built in three stages: a small fowl broth, a fried vegetable and ham base, and a milk-and-cream finish. It is workable in a modern kitchen once a few of its assumptions are made explicit.
- Do not let it boil after the milk goes inThe soup is thickened with flour and sago and then loosened with a quart of boiling milk and a cup of cream. Bring it only to a bare steam from that point; hard boiling on a rich starch base scorches on the bottom and can break the cream.
- SagoPearl sago is starch from the sago palm, sold in Asian groceries; small pearl tapioca is the usual stand-in and behaves the same way. Four tablespoons of sago plus four of flour makes a very thick soup by current taste, which is why the recipe ends by telling you to thin it.
- The cucumbers are used twiceAs written, sliced cucumber is fried into the base, strained out with everything else, and then "the slices of cucumbers" reappear in the tureen. Reserve one peeled, sliced cucumber, blanch or lightly sweat it separately, and keep it for the garnish.
- Cold roasted fowlThe meat from one leftover roast chicken, roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups picked, is about the right quantity. A food processor replaces the mortar; pulse to a coarse paste rather than a puree, since it is going through a sieve anyway.
- Veal stock and hamA pint of light veal stock can be replaced by unsalted chicken stock without much loss. The half pound of lean ham is a seasoning, not a meat course: use a piece of unsmoked or lightly smoked ham, and hold back on salt until the end.
- Brisk fire, and the sieve"Brisk" means high heat, but only long enough to soften the onion and cucumber without browning the butter, since this is meant to stay pale. A "fine hair sieve" is a fine-mesh strainer; press the solids firmly with a ladle to get the body the soup depends on.
- YieldWith two pints of broth, a quart of milk and the cream, this makes roughly two to two and a half quarts after reduction, or six to eight first-course servings.
In French classical cookery the tag a la princesse generally signals a pale, creamed dish finished with something green, most often asparagus tips, and this soup follows the convention with peas and cucumber in place of asparagus. It belongs to the long list of cream soups that filled the first course of an American hotel dinner around 1900. The recipe's logic is thoroughly institutional: it turns yesterday's roast chicken, bones and all, into a soup that reads as luxurious.