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Chicken Soup, Australian
Singe, cut off the head and feet from a small, tender fowl. Draw, detach the breast and legs from the body, cut off all the meat from the bones and cut it in half inch pieces. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a saucepan, add the meat and gently brown ten minutes, slightly stirring meanwhile. Moisten with three quarts water, add all the bones. Tie in a bunch two leeks, two branches celery, two branches parsley and one branch chervil and add to the soup. Season with two teaspoons salt and half teaspoon pepper and let boil one hour. Add three ounces raw rice, then let boil forty minutes more. Remove the bones and bouquet. Skim fat from the surface of the broth. Heat in a saucepan one half ounce butter, add one and a half ounces flour, stir well, then pour the soup into this pan, mix well, and let boil ten minutes. Add half teaspoon curry powder, mix well, pour the soup in a tureen and serve.
A curried chicken and rice soup, thickened with a roux at the end. Two things need attention: the rice is boiled far longer than modern rice tolerates, and the curry powder goes in raw at the last minute.
- The birdA "small, tender fowl" means a young chicken, bought as the recipe assumes: unsinged, undrawn, with head and feet still on. Modern supermarket birds arrive singed, drawn and clean, so the first sentence is already done for you; keep the carcass, since the bones are what give the broth body.
- Rice timingForty minutes of boiling after an hour of simmering will reduce long-grain rice to paste. Add it about 18-20 minutes before serving, or cook it separately and add it to the finished soup if you want distinct grains.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh. Use a little extra parsley with a few tarragon leaves, or leave it out; it is a background note, not the point of the soup.
- Quantities in ouncesThree ounces of raw rice is a scant half cup. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon; one and a half ounces of flour is about a third of a cup.
- The rouxCook the butter and flour together for a minute or two before adding the soup, and add the hot liquid gradually while whisking. Pouring three quarts into a small pan of raw roux at once is how you get lumps.
- Curry powderStirred in at the very end it tastes dusty. Add it to the roux with the flour so the spices toast in the butter, or bloom it in a spoonful of butter separately and whisk that in.
- SkimmingWorth doing properly, especially after browning the meat in butter. Chill the broth if you have time and lift the set fat off; the soup is much cleaner for it.
- Seasoning and yieldTwo teaspoons salt for three quarts is light by modern taste; season again after the roux goes in, since the flour mutes it. Serves eight generously as a first course.
This appears to come from a run of "national" soups in Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), a large compilation that gathered dishes under country labels for American cooks and hotel kitchens. The Australian attribution seems to rest largely on the curry powder: British colonial cookery carried Indian spice blends throughout the Empire, and a curried chicken-and-rice soup was as much at home in Sydney or Melbourne as mulligatawny was in Madras or a London club. Everything else in the recipe is standard French method of the period, from the tied bouquet of leek, celery and chervil to the flour-and-butter thickening whisked in at the end, which suggests the dish was Frenchified in a professional kitchen before it was given a nationality. It is a useful reminder that in turn-of-the-century cookbooks a country name often signals a single characteristic seasoning rather than any documented local recipe.