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Chicken, Pectoral
Skin and thoroughly bone a small tender fowl, cut breast in half-inch pieces and keep on a plate. Remove sinews from legs and finely chop same with two ounces of raw lean beef and pound in a mortar to a smooth paste, then add three tablespoons bread crumbs and two egg yolks and pound again until well amalgamated. Remove from mortar and roll out the force on a lightly floured table to cranberry-like balls. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a saucepan, add breast of the chicken with three finely sliced leeks and one chopped white onion; gently brown ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Moisten with one quart broth and two quarts water; add the fowl carcass, head excepted, with two teaspoons salt and half teaspoon pepper, and boil thirty-five minutes; add then three ounces raw rice and cook thirty minutes more. Plunge the meat balls in a pint boiling water two minutes, drain on a sieve and add to the soup. Remove bones from the soup, skim fat from surface, pour the soup into a soup tureen and serve.
This is a chicken soup with tiny forcemeat dumplings, written for a cook who owned a mortar and bought fowl whole. The method is sound; only the equipment and the bird need translating.
- "Fowl" is not a broilerA fowl meant a mature bird rather than a young broiler: tougher, more gelatinous, more flavour in the carcass. A 4-5 lb roasting chicken is the closest supermarket equivalent. Note that the recipe asks for a *small tender* fowl, so a hard old stewing hen will give a better broth but may not give a tender breast in the time given.
- "The force" is forcemeatThe paste of chopped leg meat (the sinews are stripped out first), beef, crumbs and yolk is a quenelle mixture. A food processor will do in moments what the mortar does at length; pulse the meats cold, then add crumbs and yolks and run until smooth and tacky.
- Cranberry-like ballsAbout 3/4 inch across — roughly a rounded teaspoon of forcemeat each. Wet or floured hands keep them from sticking. The number will depend on the size of the bird.
- Why blanch them separatelyPoaching the balls two minutes in plain water sets the exterior and sheds scum and loose fat, so they are less likely to cloud the broth; the recipe's single skimming comes at the end. Better not to skip it and drop them straight in.
- Two teaspoons of salt is for six quartsTwo teaspoons of salt is for three quarts -- The pot starts with a quart of broth plus two quarts of water and boils for 65 minutes. Season lightly at the start as written and correct at the end, since the broth concentrates and commercial stock is already salted.
- Boil means simmerA hard boil for 35 minutes will emulsify the fat and turn the broth grey. Hold it at a bare shiver; the instruction to skim the surface at the end assumes fat has risen rather than been beaten in.
- The riceThree ounces is about 1/2 cup of raw long-grain rice, and thirty minutes will leave it very soft and the soup thickened — which is the intent. Add it later, around 15 minutes, if you want the grains distinct.
- Head exceptedThe carcass goes in the pot for body; the head does not. Modern birds arrive headless, so this line is simply a relic of buying poultry whole from a poulterer.
- YieldUnder the three quarts you start with, after 65 minutes of boiling — enough for six to eight as a first course.
"Pectoral" here is medical vocabulary, not culinary: in nineteenth-century usage a pectoral remedy was one thought good for the chest and lungs, and pectoral soups, broths and lozenges are often said to have been part of the domestic repertoire for coughs and convalescence. The dish sits in a long tradition of restorative chicken broths — the bouillon de poulet and the Jewish and Persian chicken soups alike were credited with reviving the sick well before anyone measured what was in them — and the recipe's construction shows the same intent: a long-simmered bird, rice for substance, and a light meat forcemeat. The pounded quenelle worked through a mortar and the direction to leave out the head belong to a period when a cook expected to break down a whole bird and waste none of it.