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Creme of Chicken, Chevreuse
Cut head off, draw and wipe a fowl of about three pounds; place it in a large saucepan with a sliced carrot, two sliced onions, three sliced leeks, three sliced branches celery, two branches parsley, one branch chervil, one clove garlic, one ounce raw lean bacon, one ounce raw lean ham, one bay leaf, one sprig thyme, one clove, twelve allspice, four quarts water, one level tablespoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg. Cover pan and let slowly boil two hours and a half. Finely slice three ounces well-cleaned, fresh mushrooms, place in a large saucepan with one and a half ounces butter and brown fifteen minutes, stirring meanwhile; lift them up with a skimmer and place in mortar, and keep butter in pan on corner of range until required. Remove fowl from broth, skin and bone it, place meat in the mortar with mushrooms and thoroughly pound both to a smooth paste, place and keep on a plate. Add two and a half ounces flour to mushroom butter, mix well while heating for one minute, then strain broth through a Chinese strainer into this roux; gradually add the fowl and mushrooms, mixing on range until it comes to a boil, then add one gill cream; and let boil twenty-five minutes. Dilute two egg yolks with quarter gill cream and the juice of half a lemon, add to the soup, mixing while heating for three minutes, but not allowing to boil. Remove, strain through a sieve into a basin, then through a cheesecloth into a soup tureen, add three tablespoons boiled rice, mix a little and serve.
A classical cream soup built the long way: a full stewing fowl becomes both the broth and, pounded with mushrooms, the body of the soup. The measurements are Delmonico's-era professional shorthand.
- The liaison is the hingeOnce the egg yolks, cream and lemon juice go in, the soup must be held below a simmer for those three minutes. Any boil and the yolks curdle and the lemon acid worsens it; the double straining that follows will not rescue a broken liaison.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup, so a quarter gill is 2 tablespoons. A saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon, making the cayenne about 1/2 teaspoon and the nutmeg 1/4 teaspoon. Twelve allspice means twelve whole berries.
- "Fowl" is not a broilerA three-pound fowl in Filippini's day meant an older laying hen, tough and deeply flavoured, which is why it takes two and a half hours. A supermarket roasting chicken of the same weight will be falling apart in half that time; a stewing hen, if you can find one, is closer to the intent.
- Kitchen equipmentA Chinese strainer is a chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer; a fine sieve does the same work. The mortar-pounding of chicken and mushrooms to a smooth paste is the job of a food processor, though a few pulses short of a puree keeps some texture.
- "Slowly boil" means simmerOld cookbooks often use "boil" loosely for anything above a bare tremble. A hard boil for two and a half hours will cloud the broth badly, which matters here because the soup is repeatedly strained for clarity of texture.
- Browning the mushroomsFifteen minutes in butter is not an error. The mushrooms need to give up their water and colour before the flour goes in, and that browned butter is the fat for the roux.
- YieldFour quarts of water reduces over the long simmer; the recipe gives no yield, but the finished soup should serve roughly eight to ten as a first course. The three tablespoons of boiled rice are a garnish stirred in at the end, not a thickener.
- "Cut head off, draw"The bird arrives dressed today. Skip straight to rinsing and drying it.
The recipe comes from Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, whose books recorded the French repertoire as it was cooked in American restaurant kitchens at the turn of the twentieth century. The name follows the classical French habit of attaching a place or title to a dish: Chevreuse is a town and former duchy southwest of Paris, though what the name denoted as a garnish is not consistently recorded, and the connection to the rice that closes this soup is a guess rather than a documented link. The construction itself is textbook crème in the older sense, before the term narrowed: a bird simmered with an aromatic bouquet, its own flesh pounded back into the liquid as body, thickened with roux, enriched with cream, and finished with an egg-and-lemon liaison. That pounding of cooked meat to a paste and returning it to the pot is a technique that seems to have faded from home kitchens as commercial stock and blenders changed what cooks expected of a soup.