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Chicken, Hollandaise
Neatly draw a very small, tender fowl, tear off the skin, detach the legs, then remove all the meat from the body and legs, and cut the meat in half-inch-square pieces. Place in a saucepan with a finely chopped white onion and brown over a slow fire for ten minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Moisten with a quart broth and three pints water, season with two teaspoons salt and a half teaspoon pepper, and add all the chicken bones, with one medium carrot cut in quarters. Tie in a bunch two leeks, two branches parsley, two branches celery, one sprig thyme, one bay leaf and two cloves and add to the soup. Let boil for forty minutes, add three ounces raw rice and cook for forty minutes longer, take up the bouquet and bones, skim the fat from the surface, pour the soup into a tureen and serve.
A whole-bird soup built in one pot: the meat browns first, the carcass goes in for body, and rice finishes it. Nothing here is difficult, but the liquid measures and the rice timing need translating.
- "Draw" the fowlDrawing means removing the innards, which any supermarket bird has already had done. Buy a 2½–3 lb chicken or, better, a small stewing fowl if your butcher has one; skin it, bone it, and keep every bone for the pot.
- Liquid, in cupsA quart of broth plus three pints of water is 4 cups broth and 6 cups water, 10 cups in all. Expect to lose a cup or more to evaporation over eighty minutes of boiling, so use a wide-ish pot and top up with water if it reduces past your liking.
- Browning with no fat listedThe recipe calls for no butter or oil, but a modern skinned bird gives up very little of its own; use a tablespoon of butter or oil so the meat and onion colour rather than stick. Ten minutes over low heat gives colour, not a hard sear.
- Three ounces of riceThat is about a scant ½ cup of long-grain raw rice — a deliberately light hand, since this is a broth with rice in it, not a thick pilaf-soup.
- The rice timingForty minutes will collapse modern long-grain rice into the broth and thicken it considerably. If you want distinct grains, add the rice for the last 15–18 minutes instead and let the soup simmer alone for the rest of the second stage.
- Keep it at a bare simmer"Let boil" in older cookbooks often amounts to no more than a steady simmer. A hard rolling boil emulsifies the chicken fat into the broth and clouds it, which defeats the skimming step at the end.
- The bouquetTie the leeks, parsley, celery, thyme, bay and cloves in cheesecloth or bind them with kitchen twine so they lift out whole. Stick the cloves into a leek or a piece of onion; loose cloves are unpleasant to bite into.
- SeasoningTwo teaspoons of salt suits 10 cups of unsalted homemade broth. If you are using commercial stock, start with half and correct at the end, after the rice has absorbed liquid and the soup has reduced.
- YieldRoughly 2½ quarts, serving six to eight as a first course. The chicken meat stays in the soup — it is the substance of the dish, not a discard.
The name is menu French, not a place of origin: à la hollandaise on a turn-of-the-century card signalled Dutch style. The International Cook Book belongs to the era of the grand-hotel repertoire, when a professional kitchen was expected to produce a differently labelled soup for every day of a long season, and dozens of near-identical chicken broths were distinguished chiefly by their garnish — rice here, barley or vermicelli or a julienne of vegetables elsewhere. The structure also reflects a household economy that has largely vanished: one small fowl yields the meat and the bones for body, so a single bird makes a soup for eight with nothing bought in but rice and a few roots.