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Cream of Rice, Japonaise
Place in a saucepan six ounces well-washed rice, add three sliced leeks, one medium, sliced onion, two branches parsley, one branch chervil, one clove and one bay leaf. Moisten with two quarts water, season with teaspoon salt, add one pound raw chicken and half pound raw veal bones, then let slowly boil for one and a half hours, press the soup through a sieve, then through a Chinese strainer into saucepan and keep hot until required. Have quart boiling water in saucepan with teaspoon salt, strew in two ounces Japanese pearls and boil for forty minutes, occasionally mixing at the bottom. Drain on a sieve and wash under running water until free from sticking to the fingers, add them to the soup. Dilute a teaspoon curry powder in teaspoon cream and add to the soup, pour in two gills milk and two gills cream, adding a half ounce butter, saltspoon cayenne pepper and saltspoon grated nutmeg, mix well until it comes to a boil, skim the scum from the surface, pour the cream into a soup tureen and serve.
A classic cream soup in the French manner, thickened by rice cooked to collapse and strained, with pearl tapioca or sago as the garnish that earns it the name. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the measures and one of the timings need translating.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills milk and two gills cream are one cup each. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon; the cayenne and nutmeg are meant to be barely perceptible.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. The recipe strains twice: first a coarse sieve, pressing the softened rice and vegetables through to give body, then the chinois to smooth it. A food mill followed by a fine sieve does much the same job.
- Japanese pearlsPearl sago or pearl tapioca, sold in many supermarkets and in Asian groceries. Two ounces is roughly a third of a cup dry, and it swells considerably.
- Forty minutes is too longModern small pearl tapioca is translucent in 15 to 20 minutes in plenty of boiling water; large pearls take longer. Cook until no white core remains at the centre, then stop. The rinse under running water, as the recipe directs, is not optional, or they cement together.
- The chicken and the bonesThe recipe says only one pound of raw chicken; a bone-in piece such as wing, back or thigh would suit the purpose. It flavours the liquid and is discarded with the veal bones at the straining, so nothing of the meat goes into the finished soup.
- ChervilIncreasingly hard to find fresh. A little flat parsley with two or three tarragon leaves approximates the anise note; leaving it out costs the soup little.
- Bloom the currySlaking a teaspoon of curry powder in a teaspoon of cream keeps it from clumping, but the raw-spice edge remains. Warming the powder briefly in the half ounce of butter before adding it gives a rounder flavour.
- The final boil"Mix well until it comes to a boil" should be read as bringing it just to the point of boiling. A cream soup held at a rolling boil will separate and catch on the bottom.
- YieldTwo quarts of stock reduced over an hour and a half, plus two cups of dairy, gives about six to eight first-course servings.
The tag japonaise in turn-of-the-century restaurant French is sometimes attached to a garnish of pearl sago or tapioca, whose small translucent spheres were read as exotic and eastern, though in classical French garnish nomenclature " cr" " "a la japonaise" more commonly denotes Japanese artichokes, or crosnes; sago comes from palm pith, chiefly from island Southeast Asia, and tapioca from cassava, and cooks of the period used the two names loosely. The soup itself is otherwise entirely orthodox French practice: a white stock built on chicken and veal bones, rice cooked to dissolution as the thickener rather than a flour roux, then sieved, finished with milk and cream, and named for its garnish. The whisper of curry powder and cayenne is the other gesture toward the East, and typical of the era's grand hotel cookery. Its appearance in a book organised around the world's kitchens says less about Japan than about how the unfamiliar was classified.