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Chicken Soup, Bavaroise
Cut head and feet off a fowl of about three pounds, completely draw wipe and cut (except the carcass) into half-inch-square pieces. Cut in very small squares the white parts of two leeks, a sound onion, seedless green pepper and two ounces raw, lean salt pork, place with fowl in a saucepan, add an ounce butter and brown on fire for fifteen minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Moisten with four pints water, one and a half pints broth, season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper and let boil for twenty-five minutes. Break two ounces macaroni in very short pieces, add to soup with a teaspoon chopped chives and let boil continually for fifty minutes. Place in saucepan a tablespoon melted butter, one and a half ounces flour, and stir on fire while heating for two minutes. Pour in two gills milk, one saltspoon cayenne, one saltspoon grated nutmeg, mix with whisk until it comes to a boiling point, then pour into soup. Mix well, allow to boil for ten minutes, pour soup into a tureen and serve.
A substantial milk-thickened chicken soup from the era when a "fowl" meant a mature laying hen and the cook drew the bird herself. Most of the work of translation is in the units and in the pasta timing.
- Read the pasta timing firstMacaroni boiled 50 minutes, then a further 10 after the milk goes in, will disintegrate into starch. Modern dried macaroni needs 8-10 minutes; add it near the end of the simmer, not the start, and let the soup itself carry the long cooking.
- The fowlA three-pound "fowl" is a stewing hen — an older bird with firm, flavourful flesh that tolerates an hour of boiling. A supermarket broiler of the same weight will be tender well before that; cut the simmer back or use bone-in thighs, which hold up better.
- "Draw" and the carcassTo draw is to remove the innards. The recipe dices everything but the carcass; the frame itself should go into the pot or into stock rather than the bin, since it is where most of the body of the soup comes from.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of milk is one cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon — so a scant 1/4 teaspoon each of cayenne and nutmeg, which is assertive but not extreme in five and a half pints of liquid.
- Liquid volumeFour pints water plus one and a half pints broth is roughly 2.6 litres before reduction. This is a large pot; expect eight to ten servings.
- Salt porkTwo ounces of raw lean salt pork is the seasoning backbone. Unsmoked pancetta or a piece of unsmoked bacon is the closest substitute; if using anything smoked, the character of the soup shifts noticeably. Taste before adding the full teaspoon of salt.
- The thickeningA tablespoon of butter to an ounce and a half of flour is a dry, tight roux — cook it the full two minutes to lose the raw flour taste, then whisk in the milk off the heat before returning it to the fire, or it will lump.
- Green pepper"Seedless green pepper" means a green bell pepper with the seeds and ribs removed, not a chilli. Use one small pepper.
The book is Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), written by a chef long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it works through hundreds of soups in the encyclopaedic manner of the period — a page of chicken soups, each distinguished by one or two additions and a national or personal tag. The name here is doing modest work: a dish styled à la bavaroise may suggest milk or cream, though the classical usage covers several unrelated preparations, and milk is exactly what separates this soup from its neighbours, the cup of milk whisked into a roux and stirred in at the end. The better-known bavaroise was a sweetened milk-and-egg drink flavoured with tea, said to have been made for Bavarian princes in early eighteenth-century Paris; the connection to soups of this kind is the milk rather than any documented lineage. What the recipe really records is a house style — salt pork, leek, a browning stage before the liquid, and a flour-and-milk liaison to finish — applied methodically to whatever bird was in the larder.