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Cream of Cucumbers
Peel four medium cucumbers, cut in pieces and remove seeds, plunge in boiling water for three minutes, remove, wash in cold water, then thoroughly drain. Place in a saucepan with an ounce butter and cook on fire for ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Moisten with two and a half quarts white broth, and half pound fresh bread crumbs, two white onions with three cloves stuck in, a level tablespoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne and a saltspoon grated nutmeg, mix well and slowly boil for forty-five minutes, skimming once in a while, strain through a sieve into another saucepan and let come to a boil. Dilute two egg yolks with one gill cream and add to the soup, lightly mix while heating without boiling for five minutes, strain cream through cheesecloth into a soup tureen and serve.
A classic cream soup in the French manner, thickened with bread and finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. The finish is where it succeeds or curdles.
- The liaisonOnce the yolks and cream go in, the soup must never boil or the yolks scramble and the texture breaks. Temper the yolk-cream mixture with a ladle of hot soup first, then return it to the pot and hold below a simmer, around 170-180F, for the five minutes given.
- UnitsA gill is half a cup. A saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon, so "two saltspoons cayenne" is about half a teaspoon; taste as you go, since the strength of ground cayenne varies a good deal.
- White brothThis is a light, unbrowned stock made from veal or chicken bones and white vegetables. A good unsalted chicken stock stands in. Two and a half quarts is a large batch, so scale down if you want four to six servings rather than a dozen.
- SaltA level tablespoon of salt assumes an unsalted homemade stock. With commercial broth, add half and correct at the end, after the bread has gone in and the volume has reduced.
- Bread crumbs"Fresh" here means soft crumb from a day-old loaf, not dry packaged crumbs, which would drink far too much liquid. Half a pound of soft crumb is the thickener in place of flour or rice.
- Blanching the cucumberThe three-minute plunge and cold rinse take the raw green edge off; do not skip it. Seeding is worth doing too, chiefly for texture and to avoid excess water in the finished soup.
- Straining twiceThe first pass through a sieve should be done with a ladle pressing the solids so the cucumber and bread go through as pulp. The final pass through cheesecloth is for smoothness only and can be skipped if you have blended the soup.
- ServingAs written this starts from ten cups of broth, so expect somewhat less than that in the tureen after forty-five minutes' boiling and straining. Serve hot in warmed bowls; reheating leftovers is possible only over very gentle heat, again without boiling.
Cream soups built on a light stock, a bread or rice binding, and a final liaison of egg yolk and cream are the standard French repertoire of the late nineteenth century, and this recipe follows that template exactly, with the cucumber standing in for the asparagus, lettuce or barley of its sister soups. Cucumber was long treated with suspicion as a raw food in English and American kitchens, thought cold and indigestible, and cooking it was one way of putting a summer surplus to use. The onion stuck with cloves is the classic oignon clouté, a period shorthand for adding aromatic depth to a white broth without clouding or coloring it, and here it is strained away rather than eaten.