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Cockie Leekie
Cut off the head and feet, singe, draw and cut a small, tender fowl into quarter-inch-square pieces. Heat in a saucepan two tablespoons melted butter, adding the fowl and lightly brown for ten minutes, occasionally mixing meanwhile; drain off the butter from the pan, keeping it for any other purpose. Moisten the fowl with three quarts hot water and let come to a boil on the fire. Then add the white part only of four leeks cut into thin slices. Season with two teaspoons salt and half teaspoon white pepper; add then a small bunch fresh, well-washed parsley. Cover the pan and let slowly boil for forty-five minutes. Then add two ounces raw rice, cover the pan and slowly boil for forty minutes more. Remove all the fat from the surface of the soup, take up the parsley, pour into a hot soup tureen and serve.
A plain Scottish broth given the French treatment: browned bird, a bouquet of parsley, rice instead of barley. It works, but a few of the instructions belong to a kitchen that bought birds whole and unplucked.
- The bird"Singe, draw" means burn off the pin feathers and remove the innards, both already done for you. A "small, tender fowl" is a young bird rather than an old boiler; a small supermarket chicken, or the equivalent weight in bone-in thighs and drumsticks, is the right substitute. Cutting it into quarter-inch pieces through the bone is unnecessary work with no benefit to the broth.
- QuantitiesThree quarts is 12 cups. Two ounces of raw rice is a scant third of a cup, which is a very light hand for that much liquid; the soup is meant to be a broth, not a thick pottage. As written it serves eight to ten as a first course.
- The rice timingLong-grain rice is done in 18 to 20 minutes. Forty minutes at a boil turns it to paste and clouds the broth. Add it for the last 20 minutes only, and hold back the total simmer time in the chicken stage instead if you want more flavour.
- "Slowly boil"Read this as a bare simmer with the surface barely moving. A true rolling boil emulsifies the chicken fat into the liquid and you will never skim it off cleanly, which is the whole point of the final instruction.
- LeeksFour leeks, whites only, sliced thin. Grit hides between the layers, so slice first and rinse the slices in a bowl of water rather than rinsing the whole leek. The dark green tops are worth adding to the pot with the parsley for flavour and lifting out at the end.
- The reserved butterDraining off the browning butter and "keeping it for any other purpose" is thrift, not technique. It is now chicken-flavoured and will not keep long at room temperature; refrigerate it and use it within a few days, or skip the step and leave the fat in, skimming at the end.
- SkimmingFat is far easier to remove cold. If time allows, chill the soup and lift the set fat off in a sheet, then reheat.
- SeasoningTwo teaspoons salt for 12 cups is modest; taste and adjust at the end, after the liquid has reduced. White pepper is used to keep the pale broth unspecked, and it is worth honouring that.
Cock-a-leekie, one of several attested spellings, is the Scottish national broth: an old boiling fowl, leeks, and long slow cooking, recorded in Scots cookery from the eighteenth century onward and served at Burns suppers and St Andrew's Day dinners. Traditional versions thicken with oatmeal or barley and, more famously, drop in a handful of prunes, a combination that reliably startles first-time eaters and is often said, though it cannot be established, to descend from the medieval habit of cooking dried fruit with meat. This version, from a book that filters national dishes through a professional Franco-American kitchen, quietly drops the prunes, substitutes rice for barley, and browns the bird in butter first.