No. 269

Puree of Chicken a la Dufferin

Puree de poulet a la Dufferin

Take a good three pound chicken; raise the fillets, break up the bones and put them into a saucepan, with three quarts of broth; leave to boil for an hour, then strain the liquid through a fine sieve. Saute the removed fillets, then pound them with four hard boiled egg-yolks, and mix in slowly a pint of veloute; also two quarts of stock. Strain the puree through a tammy, heat up without letting it boil, and just when ready to serve incorporate in two ounces of fresh butter, working it well into the soup. Serve separately a garnishing of pearl barley, and puff paste croutons cooked white, meaning cooked in a very slack oven.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A late-nineteenth-century restaurant purée: chicken breast pounded with egg yolk, loosened with velouté and stock, and finished off the heat with butter. The whole thing hinges on never letting it boil once the yolks are in.

Do not let it boilThe four hard-boiled yolks and the final two ounces of butter are what give the soup its body and sheen. Above a bare simmer the yolk proteins tighten and the purée turns grainy, and the butter breaks out as oil. Hold it at 170-180F and add the butter off the heat, whisking in small pieces.
"Raise the fillets"This means removing the two breast halves from the bone, skin off. The legs and thighs are not used in the soup body; they go into the pot with the carcass for the broth, or can be reserved for another dish.
VeloutéA pint of the classic white sauce: equal weight blond roux cooked with chicken stock until it coats a spoon, roughly 2 oz butter and 2 oz flour to a pint of stock. Ranhofer assumed a standing pot of it in the kitchen; make it first, and keep it thin.
TammyA tammy was a length of loosely woven worsted cloth, wrung between two people to force purée through. A fine chinois pressed with a ladle does the same work, and a blender before straining will save most of the pounding.
Pounding the filletsThe original wants the sautéed breast reduced to a smooth paste in a mortar with the yolks. Sauté gently in butter, taking no colour, or the finished soup goes grey-brown instead of ivory.
Liquid quantitiesThree quarts of broth for the bones, reduced somewhat over the hour, plus two quarts of stock in the purée. That is a banquet-scale soup of roughly five quarts; halve or quarter it for a household. Salt is not mentioned anywhere and must be added at the end.
"Very slack oven"For the white croutons, a very low oven, 250-275F. The paste is meant to dry through without browning, which takes considerably longer than a normal bake.
Pearl barley garnishSimmer separately in salted water or stock until tender, 30-40 minutes, and rinse. Kept out of the soup it stays distinct and does not cloud the purée with starch.
YieldAs written, 16-20 servings as a first course.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) was Charles Ranhofer's summing-up of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its soup chapter runs to dozens of pury garnish and by the name of whoever was being flattered. The dedication here is generally taken to be Lord Dufferin, Governor General of Canada in the 1870s and later Viceroy of India and British ambassador in Paris and Rome, a diplomat of exactly the rank Delmonico's liked to attach to a dish. The construction is pure haute cuisine of the period: a soup built as a purin the older technical sense, thickened not with cream or starch alone but with pounded cooked meat and hard-boiled egg yolk forced through cloth, an older method that had largely disappeared from professional practice by the mid-twentieth century in favour of cream liaisons and blenders.

Century Old Kitchen · Soup

Every soup, printed twice.

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