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Chicken Soup, English Style
Detach legs and breast from a two-to three-pound fowl, remove skin, bones, and cut meat in half-inch pieces, thoroughly draw carcass and tie bones together with string.
Heat a tablespoon melted butter in saucepan, add chicken pieces, with a small carrot and turnip, onion, two leeks, all cut in very small square pieces, and gently brown for ten minutes, stirring once in a while. Moisten with three and a half quarts water, season with a tablespoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, two tablespoons Worcestershire sauce, and add bunch of bones with two ounces well-washed, thoroughly drained barley. Let gently boil for two hours and a half, being careful to skim fat off surface once in a while, remove bones, pour in a gill demi-glace boil for two minutes, pour soup into a tureen and serve.
A long-boiled barley broth in the hotel style, written for a cook who breaks down a whole bird rather than buying parts. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- A gill of demi-glaceA gill is half a cup. Demi-glace is reduced brown veal stock; a heaped tablespoon of commercial demi-glace concentrate loosened with hot water, or half a cup of well-reduced brown stock, does the same job of darkening and rounding the broth.
- "Fowl" is not a broilerA two- to three-pound fowl meant a mature laying hen with firm flesh and plenty of gelatin in the frame. A supermarket chicken of that size is a young bird; it will still make good soup, but the body will be thinner. A stewing hen from a butcher or Asian market is the closer match.
- "Thoroughly draw the carcass"Remove and discard the lungs, kidneys and any clotted blood along the backbone, and rinse the cavity. These are the parts that turn a long-simmered stock bitter and cloudy.
- Cut the meat late, or accept it shreddedHalf-inch pieces boiled for two and a half hours will fall to threads. If you want recognisable meat in the bowl, brown it as directed, lift it out after the first hour, and return it for the last ten minutes.
- Barley quantityTwo ounces is a scant third of a cup of pearl barley, which swells to roughly three or four times its volume. That is a reasonable amount for this much liquid; much more and you risk a porridge by the end.
- SaltA tablespoon of salt goes in at the start, but the liquid will reduce over two and a half hours and the Worcestershire adds salt of its own. Start with half, and correct at the end.
- "Gently boil"Read this as a bare simmer with the surface barely moving. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat you are being told to skim and clouds the broth.
- YieldRoughly two to two and a half quarts finished, depending on how hard it simmers, serving eight to ten as a first course or five to six as a main.
The English marker here is not the chicken but the seasoning and the grain: Worcestershire sauce, commercially bottled in Britain from the 1830s, and pearl barley, the thickener of British broths long before rice or pasta took the job. The leeks and barley put it within reach of Scotch broth and cock-a-leekie, both of which build a bird or a joint of mutton onto the same vegetable-and-grain base. What marks it as a professional recipe rather than a domestic one is the finishing gill of demi-glace, a French brown-stock reduction stirred in at the last minute for colour and depth. Books of this kind were written by hotel and restaurant men cataloguing dishes by nationality, and the result here is a bowl that no English cottage would have recognised in its details while recognising it entirely in its shape.