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Cream of Chicken
Cut off the head, draw and neatly wipe a very small fowl. Place it in a saucepan with four quarts water, add two onions with a clove stuck in each, one leek, two branches celery, one each branch parsley and chervil, an ounce piece salt pork, and season with one and a half teaspoons salt. Cover pan and let simmer for two and a half hours, take up fowl and plunge in cold water to cool off. Take out, pull off skin, pick off meat, place in mortar with a handful boiled rice, pound to a smooth paste, remove and keep on a plate. Place one ounce butter and two ounces flour in a saucepan and stir while heating for one minute. Skim fat off surface of broth, strain into this roux pan, briskly mix with a wooden spoon until it comes to a boil, then add little by little the puree, sharply mixing while adding it. Season with a saltspoon each cayenne and grated nutmeg, mix well, then let slowly boil for thirty minutes, frequently mixing meanwhile. Strain soup through sieve into a basin, then through cheesecloth into another saucepan, let come to a boil, add one gill cream, the juice of a quarter lemon, half ounce fresh butter, and lightly mix while heating for five minutes. Pour cream into a soup tureen and serve with a plate of croutons separately.
A classic French velouté-style cream soup built from scratch: a long-simmered fowl broth, the cooked meat pounded with rice as a thickener, then bound with roux and finished with cream. Nothing here is difficult, but a few of the measures and one piece of equipment need translating.
- The hinge: finish off the boilOnce the cream, lemon juice and raw butter go in, keep the soup below a simmer for those five minutes. Hard boiling after the acid and dairy are added risks curdling the cream and breaking the butter enrichment, and the point of the finish is a glossy, smooth texture.
- "A very small fowl"A fowl in 1900 meant a mature laying hen, tough and full of flavour, meant for long simmering. A 2 1/2 to 3 lb chicken is the closest supermarket equivalent; it will be done well before two and a half hours, so pull it as soon as the meat leaves the bone and let the broth carry on alone.
- "Cut off the head, draw"Drawing means removing the innards. Any bird you buy now is already drawn and dressed; skip straight to wiping it clean as the recipe directs.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. A saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon, so a quarter teaspoon each of cayenne and grated nutmeg for the whole pot, which is restrained rather than shy.
- Mortar to blenderThe pounded chicken-and-rice purée is what gives the soup body and its faintly grainy richness. A food processor or blender does the job in seconds; add a ladle of hot broth to loosen it so it purées smoothly rather than pasting up.
- A handful of riceTake this as about a half cup of cooked rice. It is there as a starch binder alongside the roux, not as a visible ingredient, since everything gets sieved twice.
- The double strainingSieve first, then cheesecloth. This is not fussiness: the chicken purée leaves fibre behind, and the cloth is what makes the difference between a chicken soup and a crème. Press firmly through the sieve so you do not discard half the body of the soup.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh; look for it at farmers' markets in spring. A small sprig of tarragon plus extra parsley approximates its faint anise note, though the original is milder.
- YieldThe four quarts of water will have reduced considerably by the end of the cooking; reckon on roughly eight servings as a first course. Cut the croutons small and pass them separately as directed, so they do not soften in the tureen.
This is the French kitchen's crème de volaille, set down in the form professional cooks in America learned it: broth from a boiling fowl, the meat itself pounded to a purée and returned to the pot, a flour-and-butter liaison, and a last enrichment of cream, butter and lemon off the boil. The technique of pounding cooked meat with rice or bread in a mortar to thicken and flavour a soup is much older than the roux, reaching back to medieval and early modern potages, and it survived in restaurant practice into the twentieth century precisely because it wasted nothing: the bird gave up its flavour to the broth and its flesh to the body of the soup. A great deal of what late nineteenth-century American cookbooks presented as international cookery was in practice French hotel cookery, where a two-and-a-half-hour stockpot and a mortar were simply part of the morning's work.