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Cream of Leeks, Royale
Place in a saucepan six pared and cleaned, sliced leeks with one ounce butter and cook on a slow fire for ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile, dredge in two ounces flour, and stir well while heating for one minute. Moisten with a quart broth and a quart milk, add two branches parsley, one branch chervil and four sliced, shallots; season with a level tablespoon salt, two tablespoons cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg, lightly mix and let boil for forty minutes. Dilute two egg yolks, with a gill cream and add to the soup with one-half ounce butter, mix well for two minutes, strain the soup through a sieve into a basin, then through a cheesecloth into a soup tureen, add a royale garnishing, lightly mix and serve.
A classic French leek velouté finished with an egg-and-cream liaison and cut with royale custard. The recipe is sound apart from one clearly mistaken quantity.
- The cayenne is a misprintTwo tablespoons of cayenne in two quarts of soup would be inedible. Read it as a pinch, or at most a scant quarter teaspoon; the salt figure (a level tablespoon for two quarts of liquid) is reasonable, the cayenne is not.
- Old measuresA gill is half a cup. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon. Two ounces of flour is roughly a scant half cup; one ounce of butter is two tablespoons.
- "Branches" of herbsA branch is a sprig or small stem, not a bunch. Chervil is the harder one to find fresh; a little tarragon plus extra parsley reads closer to it than parsley alone.
- Sweat, do not colourThe ten minutes over a slow fire is meant to soften the leeks without browning them. Any colour at this stage muddies both the flavour and the pale finish the recipe is aiming for.
- The liaison is the hingeOnce the yolks and cream go in, the soup must not boil. Temper the yolk mixture with a ladle of hot soup first, return it off the heat, and hold it below a simmer or it will curdle and no amount of straining will fix the texture.
- Forty minutes is longThat was normal practice when flour-thickened soups needed time to lose their raw taste. Twenty-five to thirty minutes gives a cleaner leek flavour; stir the base occasionally so the flour does not catch.
- Double strainingThe sieve removes the vegetables and herbs, the cheesecloth catches the last flour specks and any thread of cooked yolk. The second pass is what gives the soup its smooth, glossy finish.
- Royale garnishA royale is a firm unsweetened custard — eggs beaten with broth or cream, set gently in a shallow mould in a water bath, cooled, and cut into small dice or diamonds. This page gives no instructions for it; it is added at the last moment so it does not break up.
- YieldTwo quarts of liquid before reduction gives six to eight first-course servings.
Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The International Cook Book (1906), which ranges across national cuisines. This soup is textbook Escoffier-era construction: a roux-bound velouté of one vegetable, moistened half with broth and half with milk, then enriched at the end with a liaison of yolks and cream and passed twice for absolute smoothness. "Royale" here names the garnish rather than the soup — the savoury baked custard cut into shapes that French kitchens used to dress consommés and cream soups. Leeks were a workhorse allium of European kitchens long before they became a specialty item. The instructions assume a reader who already knows what a royale is and needs only the proportions, which is why they stop where a modern recipe would start explaining.