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Cream of Rice and Chicken Soup
Chicken bones should be covered with three pints cold water. Let boil up for a few minutes, then simmer until stock is reduced to a pint. Melt one tablespoonful butter; when bubbling add one tablespoonful flour, one salt-spoonful salt, a little nutmeg and cayenne. Pour in stock gradually, let boil up, add one-fourth (or one-third) cup cooked rice and a little of the thick rice water in which it was cooked, if this has been saved. When well heated add half a cup of cream and the grated yolk of one hard-cooked egg.
A small velouté built on a carcass stock, thickened twice — once with a roux, again with cooked rice and its starchy water. The whole thing scales to about two servings.
- The hinge: add the cream at the end, off the boilThe hinge: add the cream at the end -- Once the half cup of cream goes in, keep the pan below a boil; hard boiling after the cream can make the soup look grainy rather than smooth.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Under-salt at this stage and correct at the end, since reducing three pints of stock to one concentrates whatever the bones give up.
- Three pints to one pintThat is a two-thirds reduction, and at a bare simmer in an uncovered pan it will take a good while, depending on the width of the pan. Boil it hard and you get cloudy stock; the brief "boil up for a few minutes" brings the scum to the surface, which can be skimmed before the pan settles into its simmer.
- Strain, and strain thoroughlyThe original assumes it. Pour the reduced stock through a fine sieve or muslin — small poultry bones splinter, and this soup has no other body to hide fragments in.
- The rouxOne tablespoon butter to one tablespoon flour is a light thickening for a pint. Cook it a minute or two until it smells nutty but takes no colour, then add the hot stock in stages, whisking, to avoid lumps.
- Rice waterThe starchy liquid from boiling rice by the absorption-free method — plenty of water, drained off. Few people save it now. Without it, the soup will simply be slightly thinner; a spoonful or two of extra cooked rice puréed into the stock does the same work.
- The grated yolkThe recipe grates the yolk of one hard-cooked egg in at the end, with the cream; pushing it through a fine sieve gives the same effect. It is garnish and enrichment both, so add it at the last moment.
- YieldAround 3 cups finished soup — two servings as a first course.
Books of this kind, apparently published in the decades either side of 1900 though the dating rests on style alone, treated a chicken carcass as an obligation rather than an option: the bird had been paid for whole and the frame still held stock. The soup itself is a cream of rice, lightened with rice starch instead of leaning entirely on flour, a technique long used to give body without heaviness in invalid and convalescent cookery. The grated hard yolk scattered over the top is a Victorian and Edwardian garnishing habit that appears across soups, salads and fish dishes of the period, and it made a plain white soup look considered.