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Cream of Barley
Wash a half pound barley in several cold waters and rub with the hands until the water is clear. Then drain and place in a saucepan with two and a half quarts beef broth; add one sliced carrot, one sliced onion and two sliced leeks. Season with a teaspoon salt, cover the pan and let gently cook for two hours. Press it through a sieve and return it to the pan; add one pint milk, two gills cream and half ounce butter; whisk the whole well together for one minute, boil again, skim off the scum, add a teaspoon powdered sugar, whisk again for a minute, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A classic pureed barley soup, thickened by the grain itself rather than by roux. The work is in the sieving, and that is where most of the outcome is decided.
- Two gills is one cupA gill is a half cup, so two gills cream equals 1 cup. With the pint of milk, that is roughly 3 cups of dairy going into the pot at the end.
- Half a pound of barleyAbout 1 1/4 cups of pearl barley. Pot or hulled barley will need noticeably longer cooking and is less likely to sieve as smoothly.
- The washing is not optionalRinsing until the water runs clear removes surface starch that would otherwise make the finished soup gluey rather than velvety. Several changes of cold water, rubbing the grains between your palms, is exactly right.
- Sieving is the hingePress the barley and vegetables through a fine sieve with a ladle or stiff spatula, working the solids hard and scraping the underside. A food mill or a blender followed by a sieve gives the same result with far less effort; skipping the sieve entirely leaves the texture grainy.
- Add the dairy off the heat, then reheat gentlyThe instruction to "boil again" will curdle nothing if the soup is well whisked and the cream is heavy, but a hard boil after the milk goes in risks scorching the barley starch on the pan bottom. Bring it just to a simmer and hold it there.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term means finely ground granulated sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. A teaspoon of ordinary sugar is what is meant; at that quantity it is there to round the flavour rather than to sweeten the soup.
- ConsistencyThe barley absorbs a good deal of the two and a half quarts of broth over two hours, and a covered pan loses little to evaporation; if the puree is thicker than heavy cream after sieving, thin it with more broth before the milk goes in. Season again at the end, since one teaspoon of salt for this volume is light by modern taste.
- YieldRoughly three quarts finished soup, serving eight to ten as a first course.
Cream soups built on a sieved grain — called crème d'orge in French kitchen usage — belong to the same family as the purée soups of rice, lentil and split pea that fill the soup chapters of turn-of-the-century cookbooks. The method here has the marks of professional practice: a grain simmered in stock with aromatics, forced through a sieve, then finished with milk, cream and butter, which is often said to be how a well-appointed kitchen of the period produced a smooth soup without a roux.