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Windsor Soup
Boil three calf's feet for one hour in two quarts of broth and one quart of water; when done and cold, cut them into pieces, moisten with three or four pints of their own broth, adding a garnished bunch of parsley, one-half wineglassful of Madeira wine, one-half tablespoonful of salt, and a little cayenne pepper. Boil again for ten minutes, then strain through a fine sieve; darken the soup with a little caramel browning, and when serving add twelve crayfish quenelles.
A clear, gelatinous calf's-foot soup of the type that survived on hotel menus into the twentieth century. Almost everything hinges on the feet: they supply the body, and nothing else in the recipe does.
- Cook the feet much longerOne hour will not do it. Calf's feet need three to four hours at a bare simmer before the collagen breaks down and the meat pulls from the bone; only then does the broth set to the trembling richness the dish depends on. The ten-minute second boil in the original is a finishing step, not the cooking.
- Sourcing calf's feetAsk a halal or Latin American butcher for patas de ternera, or an Italian butcher for piedini. They are usually sold split. If unavailable, veal knuckle plus a strip of veal shank skin gives comparable body, though less of it.
- "A garnished bunch of parsley"Most likely a bouquet garni tied up in parsley stems; the usual additions would be thyme, bay and a little celery, though the recipe does not say. Tie it with string so it lifts out whole before straining.
- WineglassfulBy the usual nineteenth-century convention a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces, which would make half a glass of Madeira roughly 2 tablespoons. Use a dry or medium Sercial or Verdelho, not a cream Madeira.
- Caramel browningSugar cooked to a dark, bitter caramel and let down with water — the Victorian kitchen's colouring agent. A commercial gravy browning does the same job. Add it a few drops at a time; the soup should read amber-brown, not black, and too much turns it acrid.
- Crayfish quenellesPounded crayfish tail bound with egg white and cream, poached in barely shivering water for a few minutes until just firm. They are poached separately and added to the hot soup at the last moment; boiling them in the soup will break them and cloud it.
- Straining and fatPass through a fine sieve lined with muslin, then chill and lift the set fat cap off the top. The recipe's instruction to cool the feet before cutting may serve this purpose as much as any other.
- YieldTwelve quenelles, two per plate, points to six servings from the three or four pints of broth the recipe calls for.
Windsor soup — usually "brown Windsor" in British kitchens — belongs to the family of dark, gelatinous soups built on calf's feet and fortified wine, alongside mock turtle and ox-tail. The name is generally traced to the royal associations of Windsor rather than to any documented royal kitchen, and the soup's later reputation as the archetype of dreary boarding-house catering says more about the twentieth century's cheap imitations than about a version like this one, which is finished with Madeira and garnished with crayfish quenelles. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, compiled his 1896 book from the hotel's working repertoire, and the recipe's terseness is typical: it assumes a brigade that already knows how to make a quenelle and burn sugar for colour. The reliance on calf's feet is itself a marker of the period, when body in a soup came from long extraction of bone and cartilage.