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Cream, Vatican
Procure a fresh four-pound sheepshead, neatly clean, cut off head, split the fish, remove fins, lift up filets on both sides and lay them on one side. Place all the trimmings, fins and head of the fish in a soup pot, pour over two quarts cold water, add a carrot, onion, branch each of parsley and celery, all finely sliced, four cloves, four allspice, twelve whole black peppers, a sprig thyme, a half sprig bay leaf and one and a half teaspoons salt, let slowly come to a boil and continue for thirty minutes. Strain broth through a clean cloth into another pan and let it come to a boil. Dilute a tablespoon rice with a half gill cold milk, level tablespoon Oriental curry powder, and gradually add to broth, gently mixing for two minutes. Add two gills thick cream and two ounces good butter, lightly mix until butter is dissolved, pour cream into a hot soup tureen and serve with oyster crackers separately.
A grand-hotel fish veloute in miniature: the whole soup is built on a thirty-minute fish stock, thickened lightly and finished with cream and butter. Two things in the text need decoding before you start.
- The filets are not usedThe recipe has you lift the filets off and lay them aside, then never returns to them. Only the head, bones, fins and trimmings go into the pot. Poach or pan-fry the filets as a separate course, or they will simply sit there.
- "A tablespoon rice"This is almost certainly rice flour rather than whole grains. A tablespoon of whole rice diluted in cold milk and stirred into boiling broth for two minutes would do nothing; rice flour slaked in cold liquid was a common thickener for cream soups of this kind.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. So half a gill of cold milk is 1/4 cup, and two gills of thick cream is 1 cup. "Thick cream" is heavy cream, roughly 36 percent fat.
- SheepsheadAtlantic sheepshead (Archosargus probatocephalus) has a large bony head that makes excellent stock. Any firm, mild, non-oily white fish frame will substitute -- snapper, sea bass, halibut. Avoid salmon, mackerel or bluefish, whose oil will turn the cream soup rank.
- Curry powderPeriod curry powders were probably milder and more turmeric-forward than many jars sold now, though blends varied. Start with two teaspoons, taste, and add the rest if you want it.
- Do not boil after the cream goes inOnce the cream and the butter are added, the soup should be warmed and mixed only until the butter melts. Boiling at that stage risks the cream separating.
- StrainingStraining the broth through cloth rather than a sieve matters here -- fish stock throws fine bone and scale debris that a colander passes straight through. Damp muslin or a coffee filter set in a strainer works.
- YieldTwo quarts of water reduced over thirty minutes, plus a cup of cream, gives roughly six to eight cups of finished soup: six to eight servings as a first course.
Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, filled his books with cream soups named for places, patrons and institutions -- Cream Vatican, Cream Windsor, Cream Marie Louise -- a naming habit inherited from French grande cuisine, where a garnish or a finish rather than a base often earned the title. The names were largely decorative: there is no documented Roman or papal connection here, and the curry powder suggests instead the late-Victorian English taste for lightly spiced fish dishes. Sheepshead was a familiar market fish on the American Atlantic coast in Filippini's day, and its decline from Northern fish counters is one reason recipes like this one stopped being cooked long before they stopped being reprinted.