Home › The World's Kitchen › Cream of Chicken, Francaise
Cream of Chicken, Francaise
Cut off head and feet and neatly draw and wipe a very small fowl. Place in saucepan with one each sliced carrot and onion, two each sliced leeks and branches celery, two branches parsley and a branch chervil. Pour in three and a half quarts water, add a half pound piece salt pork, season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper and let come to a boil. Skim fat off surface, then let slowly simmer for two hours, being careful to skim fat off once in a while. Lift up fowl, plunge in cold water for ten minutes, remove skin and entirely bone it. Place meat in mortar and pound to a paste, remove and keep on a plate. Mix in a saucepan one ounce butter and two ounces flour, strain broth in this pan, mix until it comes to a boil, then add chicken paste little by little, with two tablespoons sherry, a saltspoon each cayenne and nutmeg, thoroughly mix, then let gently boil for thirty minutes. Dilute on a plate one egg yolk with a gill cream and juice of half a sound lemon, mix well while heating for three minutes, but do not allow to boil. Strain through sieve into a vessel, then through cheesecloth into a soup tureen and serve with a plate of bread croutons separately.
A classical French chicken velouté, built from a whole bird and finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. Two things decide whether it works: the liaison must never boil, and the pounded chicken has to be fine enough to pass a sieve.
- The liaison is the hingeOnce the yolk, cream and lemon go in, the soup must stay below a simmer — around 170-180F. Bring it to a boil and the yolk curdles into threads that no amount of straining will fix. Temper the yolk mixture with a ladle of hot soup before it goes back into the pan.
- "A very small fowl"A fowl in this period meant a mature laying hen, tougher and more flavourful than a broiler. A 3 to 3 1/2 lb chicken is the closest supermarket equivalent; if you can find a stewing hen, it will make better broth and may need closer to three hours than two.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, so the cayenne and nutmeg are both very small. A "branch" of celery is one stalk, a "branch" of parsley or chervil one sprig.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh outside farmers' markets and it loses everything when dried. A sprig of tarragon plus extra parsley gives a comparable faintly anise note; leaving it out is better than using dried.
- The mortarPounding cooked chicken to a paste is what a food processor does in thirty seconds. Add a spoonful of the hot broth to loosen it, then work it smooth — a coarse purée will simply be caught by the sieve and wasted.
- Salt pork and seasoningHalf a pound of salt pork in 3 1/2 quarts contributes real salt, so hold back on the teaspoon of salt until the broth is strained and taste it then. Rinse the pork first if it is heavily cured.
- The double strainingSieve first to catch fibre, then cheesecloth for the silky finish the name promises. Warm the tureen; a strained cream soup loses heat fast and this one cannot be reheated hard.
- YieldThe 3 1/2 quarts of water will reduce over the long simmer, likely leaving somewhere in the region of two to three quarts of finished soup, enough for a first course for a large table. Croutons are served separately so they stay crisp.
This is textbook French classical soup-making: a white broth, a butter-and-flour roux, a pur a final liaison of yolk, cream and lemon — the family the Escoffier-era repertoire filed under cr and velout s de volaille, of which the best-known relative is potage la reine. The label "Francaise" here signals method rather than a region; in a book organised as a tour of the world's kitchens it marks the dish as belonging to the professional French canon. The mortar work is the period's fingerprint. Before mechanical blenders, a smooth cream soup meant a cook pounding meat by hand and then forcing it through sieve and cloth, which is presumably why such soups are generally thought of as restaurant and grand-household food rather than everyday cooking — and why the recipe spends as many words on straining as on flavouring.