Chicken Soup
In boiling chickens for salads, etc., the broth (water in which they are boiled) may be used for soup. When the chickens are to be served whole, stuff and tie in a cloth. To the broth add a dozen tomatoes (or a quart can), and one thinly-sliced onion; boil twenty minutes, season with salt and pepper, add two well-beaten eggs, and serve.
A thrift recipe: the soup is a by-product of poaching chickens for salad, so quantities depend on how much broth you have. Read it as a method rather than a formula.
- Scale it to your brothA 4-5 lb chicken poached in water to cover yields roughly 2-3 quarts of broth, which is about what a dozen tomatoes or a quart can suits. The recipe gives no yield, but that much would serve six to eight as a first course.
- A dozen tomatoesA dozen tomatoes of the size then usual comes to something like 3 lb, in the same broad range as the quart can the recipe offers as an alternative. Peel and chop fresh ones, or use a can of about a quart with its juice.
- The eggs are the hingeTwo well-beaten eggs stirred into boiling broth set into shreds within seconds. Take the pot off the heat first and drizzle the egg in a thin stream while stirring, or you get a single rubbery mass rather than threads.
- Season before the eggsThe original salts and peppers before the eggs go in, which is convenient: once egg is in, vigorous stirring to distribute salt breaks up the strands. Taste and correct while the broth is still clear.
- Twenty minutes on the tomatoesThat is enough to soften them and let their acid marry with the broth. Longer does no harm but the onion will lose its definition; slice it as thinly as the recipe says.
- Poaching the whole birdsStuffing a chicken and tying it in a cloth keeps it intact and the stuffing in place during a long simmer. Cheesecloth or a clean muslin square works; the bird still needs to reach 165F at the thigh.
- Skim and degreaseBroth from a whole poached chicken carries a good deal of fat. Skim during cooking and again before adding the tomatoes, or the finished soup tastes heavy.
Recipes like this belong to a household economy in which nothing left the kitchen unused: the chicken went to salad or fricassee, and the poaching liquid became the next day's soup. The Dixie Cook Book, compiled in the 1880s for Southern households, is full of these chains of use. Tomatoes appear here in the same breath as the canned alternative, a sign of how quickly commercial canning had reached the domestic pantry after the Civil War, when a quart tin was an ordinary winter substitute for a summer crop. Thickening or garnishing broth with beaten egg is far older than the book and turns up across Europe and Asia in forms from Roman egg-and-broth dishes to Italian stracciatella; its presence in a Southern American collection may owe less to borrowing than to convergence, egg being the cheapest thing a cook with hens could add to a thin soup.