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Creme Egyptienne
Place a pint can sweet corn in a saucepan with one quart milk and one quart and a half broth. 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 boil for forty minutes. Prepare in another saucepan a roux with one ounce melted butter and two and a half ounces flour, stirring briskly while heating for two minutes. Pour in the milk and corn, stir well with a whisk until it comes to a boil, then add one egg yolk mixed with one-half gill cream; stir well for five minutes, then strain through a cheesecloth into a hot soup tureen, and serve with bread croutons separately.
A classical cream soup built on canned corn, thickened with a roux and finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. The finishing is where it succeeds or curdles.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the yolk and cream go in, the soup must not return to a rolling boil or the yolk will scramble and the strained texture will be lost. Hold it just below a simmer for the five minutes of stirring, off direct heat if your burner runs hot.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the cayenne here is about half a teaspoon and the nutmeg a quarter. A gill is half a cup, making the half gill of cream a quarter cup.
- The can of cornA pint can is roughly a modern 15-16 oz can; drain it or not as you like, since the liquid is small against the two and a half quarts of milk and broth. Frozen kernels, about 2 cups, should serve in its place.
- Forty minutes of boilingMilk boiled hard for forty minutes will catch and scorch. Bring it up and hold it at a bare simmer, stirring the bottom now and then; the point is to soften the corn thoroughly for straining, not to reduce.
- The rouxOne ounce butter to two and a half ounces flour is a dry, sandy roux by modern proportions, closer to two tablespoons butter and a scant two-thirds cup flour. Cook it the two minutes without colour, then add the hot liquid gradually to avoid lumps.
- StrainingCheesecloth is slow with this volume. A fine chinois or a conical strainer pressed with a ladle gives the same smooth result; a blender before straining makes the job much easier and yields more body.
- BrothThe recipe says only 'broth' and does not specify a kind. If you use a commercial, already-salted one, hold back most of the teaspoon and a half of salt until the end.
- YieldRoughly two and a half to three quarts before straining, or eight to ten first-course servings. The croutons are served separately so they stay crisp.
The International Cook Book is Alexander Filippini's, and Filippini is generally associated with the Delmonico's kitchens in New York, which explains why a can of sweet corn is being handled with the full apparatus of French classical soup-making: roux, simmer, liaison, tammy-strain, croutons apart. In the classical repertoire the tag a l'egyptienne most often signals lentils or rice, so its attachment to a corn veloute here is loose; period cookbooks used such national epithets freely and often with no more logic than a suggestion of golden colour, and the connection is best treated as decorative rather than documented. What the recipe does show is canned vegetables at work in the professional kitchen, dressed up in the vocabulary of the dining room.