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Cream, Japanese
Place in a saucepan one pound clean, raw chicken bones, one pound knuckle of veal and three and a half quarts water; set on fire and let come to a boil, then skim fat from surface, season with two teaspoons salt and half teaspoon white pepper, add one minced white onion, two sliced leeks, two branches celery, also sliced, one branch parsley, one sprig thyme and one clove. Boil forty minutes, then add fifteen fresh, clean, crushed okras and allow to boil and hour and a half longer.
Mix in another saucepan one ounce butter with two and a half ounces flour, heat one minute, then strain broth through a strainer into this pan, season with a teaspoon curry, saltspoon cayenne pepper and saltspoon grated nutmeg; mix with wooden spoon until it comes to a boil, cook for thirty minutes, then pour in two gills cream, add half ounce good butter, mix until it boils and keep hot. Plunge three ounces Japanese pearls in a pint boiling water with half teaspoon salt, boil for forty minutes, and stir at bottom once in a while. Drain pearls on a sieve and wash under cold water until they do not stick to the fingers. Strain cream through a cheesecloth into a saucepan, add the pearls, lightly mix, boil for two minutes, pour soup into a tureen and serve.
A classic cream soup in the French mold: a long-simmered white stock thickened with roux, enriched with cream, and garnished with tapioca pearls. Most of the work is unattended; the finishing steps go quickly.
- Japanese pearlsAlmost certainly pearl tapioca, though period sources also use "pearls" for sago. Use large pearl tapioca, not instant or minute tapioca, which dissolves. Forty minutes is reasonable for large pearls; they are done when translucent with no white center.
- Wash the pearlsThe cold-water rinse is the hinge of the recipe. Unrinsed tapioca sheds starch and turns the finished cream cloudy and gluey. Rinse until the pearls are slick and separate, then add them at the very end.
- Gills and saltspoonsTwo gills of cream is one cup. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so the cayenne and nutmeg are each a scant quarter teaspoon.
- Knuckle of vealA veal knuckle is the joint end of the leg, valued for gelatin. Ask a butcher for veal shank or knuckle bones sawn across; a pound of pork or beef marrow bones will give body but a heavier flavor.
- Okra as thickenerFifteen pods boiled ninety minutes collapse entirely, which is the point here — they thicken and flavor the stock rather than serving as a vegetable. All of it is strained out.
- Straining twiceThe broth goes through a strainer into the roux, and the finished cream through cheesecloth again before the pearls are added. Skipping the second pass leaves fibrous okra threads in the soup.
- Cream and boilingThe original boils the cream soup twice. Keep it at a bare simmer once the dairy is in; a hard boil on a floury cream base scorches at the bottom and can break the emulsion. Stir with a wooden spoon as directed, reaching the corners of the pan.
- YieldThe stock boils about two and a quarter hours before straining, with a further thirty minutes after the roux, so three and a half quarts of water reduces considerably. The book gives no yield; a rough guess is a couple of quarts, enough for eight to ten first-course servings.
Filippini's book files soups by their finish rather than their origin − hence a run of entries beginning "Cream," of which this is one. The "Japanese" is the garnish, not the cuisine: large pearl tapioca was sold in the American and European grocery trade under names evoking Japan in the late nineteenth century. Everything else in the pot is Franco-colonial: a white veal-and-fowl stock, a roux, curry powder, cayenne and nutmeg, and okra used the way a Creole or Anglo-Indian kitchen would use it, as a thickener boiled to nothing. The result belongs to the same family as mulligatawny and the mildly curried "Indian" creams that appeared on hotel menus of the period, when a spoonful of curry powder was less a claim about a country than a flavor note a chef could count on his customers recognizing.