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Cream of Rice Au Cerfeuilles
Thoroughly wash and drain a half pound rice and place in saucepan with two and a half quarts broth. Add a finely sliced onion, two sliced each leeks and branches celery and a branch parsley. Season with a teaspoon of salt, lightly mix, let gently boil for one hour and fifteen minutes, remove, press rice through sieve into a basin and strain it through Chinese strainer into another saucepan. Add two gills cream, a half ounce good butter, saltspoon each cayenne and grated nutmeg and three finely sliced branches fresh chervil. Place pan on a brisk fire, continually mix until it comes to a boil, pour cream into a soup tureen and serve.
A classic French purée soup dressed up with chervil, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen. The measurements are period trade terms rather than home-cook ones, and a few need translating before you start.
- Gills and saltspoonsTwo gills is one cup of cream. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so a very small pinch each of cayenne and nutmeg.
- "Branch"A literal rendering of the French branche: a stalk of celery, a sprig of parsley, a stem of chervil. Two branches of celery means two ribs, not two heads.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Pressing through a sieve first, then straining, is what gives the soup its texture; a food mill followed by a fine sieve does the same work, and a blender plus a sieve is faster still.
- QuantitiesHalf a pound of rice is a generous cup; two and a half quarts of broth is 10 cups. Depending on how much liquid boils away over the hour and a quarter, expect anything from a pourable cream soup to a moderately thick purée, and roughly eight to ten first-course servings.
- The riceAny plain white rice works, though a starchy short or medium grain purées most smoothly. An hour and a quarter is longer than rice needs to cook, but the point is to collapse the grain entirely and reduce the broth; check the liquid level and top up if it falls too far.
- ChervilThe whole point of the dish, and the ingredient hardest to buy. Its aniseed-parsley flavour dies with heat, which is why it goes in at the end. Fresh tarragon plus parsley is the usual substitute, used sparingly.
- The hingeOnce the cream is in, bring it just to a boil while stirring constantly and take it off. Held at a boil, a starch-and-cream soup catches on the bottom and the chervil turns grassy.
- SeasoningOne teaspoon of salt for 10 cups of liquid assumes a well-seasoned broth. Taste and correct after straining, when the soup has reduced and concentrated.
Cream soups built on a rice purée were a fixture of the classical French repertoire, valued because rice thickens without the floury taste of a roux-based velouté and passes cleanly through a chinois. Escoffier and his contemporaries catalogued dozens of such purées, named for whatever finished them. Au cerfeuil simply means "with chervil," one of the fines herbes and a herb far more common in French kitchens than in English-speaking ones, where it never took hold as parsley did. The spelling here, "cerfeuilles," and the phrase "Chinese strainer" may hint at French kitchen notes behind the English, though no translator is documented and a chef writing directly in English out of French training would produce much the same thing; either way, the professional vocabulary of The International Cook Book is left largely intact.