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Creme Amazone
Peel and cut into small pieces three fresh, alligator pears and place in saucepan with two branches parsley, two branches sliced celery, four pints cold milk. Season with one and a half teaspoons salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Set the pan on the fire and let slowly boil for thirty-five minutes. Strain milk into a basin, place ingredients in a mortar and pound to a smooth paste, and return to the milk. Heat one ounce of butter in a saucepan, add two ounces flour, stir for a minute with a wooden spoon, then pour contents of basin into this pan. Sharply whisk for two minutes, and, as soon as it comes to a boil add one gill cream and one egg yolk diluted with a tablespoon milk. Mix with a wooden spoon for three minutes, being careful not to allow to boil again; strain through a Chinese strainer into a soup tureen, and serve with bread croutons separately.
A French-style cream soup built on avocado, from the era when the fruit was still called the alligator pear and treated as a vegetable. The method is sound classical technique, but two of its instructions work against the main ingredient.
- Alligator pearThis is the avocado. Three fruits give roughly 1 lb of flesh in total; choose fruit that yields to gentle pressure but is not stringy or darkened.
- The long boilThirty-five minutes of boiling dulls avocado flesh to grey-green and can turn it faintly bitter. A modern alternative is to infuse the milk with the parsley and celery, then add the avocado off the heat and blend it in, warming only to serving temperature.
- Do not let it boil againOnce the yolk and cream go in, the soup is a liaison and will curdle if allowed to boil, though the flour in the base gives it some protection. The original is explicit about this; hold it just below a simmer and stir constantly.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the seasoning is 1/2 teaspoon cayenne and 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg. Four pints is 8 cups of milk, which makes a large tureen.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. A fine sieve does the same job; press the solids through with a ladle rather than letting them drain.
- The rouxOne ounce butter to two ounces flour is a fairly dry roux for 8 cups of liquid, and will thicken lightly. Cook it the full minute so the flour loses its raw taste, but keep it pale.
- Yield and serviceEight generous portions. Croutons served separately keeps them crisp.
The avocado reached English through Spanish aguacate, from the Nahuatl ahuacatl, but for much of the nineteenth century American and British cooks knew it as the alligator pear, a name generally traced to its pebbled skin and pear shape. Recipes like this one show the fruit entering fashionable cookery from the West Indies and Central America before commercial California groves made it an everyday item; it is handled here as a vegetable to be boiled, pounded in a mortar and bound with roux and egg yolk. The name looks like hotel-French, with Amazone presumably chosen for exotic effect rather than for any actual connection to the Amazon.