Home › The World's Kitchen › Creme, Duchesse
Creme, Duchesse
Place in a saucepan five ounces well-washed barley with one minced onion, two minced leeks, two branches each celery and parsley and one chervil also minced, one clove and one bay leaf. Moisten with three and a half quarts water and season with a level tablespoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well, cover the pan, and let slowly simmer for two hours. Place in a mortar a half pound chopped fresh lean veal and pound to a paste, then add it little by little to the soup, stirring while adding it. Add one pint milk, mix well, and let slowly boil for twenty minutes longer. Dilute two egg yolks with a gill cream and add to the soup, continually stirring for five minutes. Press the cream through a sieve into a basin, then through a cheesecloth into a soup tureen, add a half ounce good butter in small bits, mix a little and serve with a plate of croutons separately.
A veal-and-barley velouté in the old French style, thickened three ways: by the barley, by pounded raw veal, and finally by egg yolks. The last stage is the one that decides whether it works.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the yolks and cream go in, the soup must not boil. Hold it at about 175-180F and stir for the full five minutes; above roughly 185F the yolks curdle and no amount of sieving will fix the grain.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so the cayenne comes to roughly half a teaspoon and the nutmeg to a quarter — assertive but not fierce for three and a half quarts.
- Pounding the vealHalf a pound of lean veal pounded to a paste in a mortar is the period method for a raw-meat thickener. A food processor does it in under a minute; scrape down and work it smooth, since any lump will set into a thread when it hits the hot liquid.
- Adding the veal pasteAdd it in small spoonfuls off a full boil, whisking hard between additions, or it will seize into strands rather than dissolving. It needs the full twenty minutes at a bare simmer to cook through and lose its raw taste.
- Chervil"One chervil" means one sprig or small bunch of fresh chervil. It is rarely stocked; a little tarragon plus extra parsley is the usual substitute, though the anise note is stronger.
- BarleyFive ounces is about three-quarters of a cup of pearl barley. Two hours of simmering will collapse it, which is the intention here — it is a thickener, not a garnish, and most of it passes through the sieve.
- The double strainingSieve first to break up the solids, then pass through damp cheesecloth for the smooth finish. A fine chinois with a ladle pressed against it does both jobs; expect to lose a good deal of volume to the solids.
- Butter and yieldThe half ounce of butter goes in off the heat, whisked in bit by bit for gloss. The finished quantity serves ten to twelve as a first course; it does not reheat well once the yolks are in, so warm leftovers gently and never past a simmer.
The name places this in the nineteenth-century French repertoire, where dishes were routinely labelled after nobility — duchesse, princesse, impératrice — with no fixed relationship between the title and the ingredients. A paste of lean white meat pounded and worked through hot broth was one way to give a soup body and a delicate savour at once, and it demanded a mortar and a strong arm.