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Creme, Princesse
Boil for thirty minutes a pint fresh asparagus tips in two quarts water with a half teaspoon salt; thoroughly drain and keep the water. Place the tips in a large saucepan with one ounce butter and cook on fire for ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile; then add the asparagus liquor, one and a half quarts broth, one pound well-cleaned raw chicken bones, four ounces raw rice, one teaspoon salt, one teaspoon sugar, two saltspoons cayenne pepper, one onion with two cloves stuck in it, two branches parsley and one branch chervil; mix well and let slowly boil one hour and a half. Remove, press it through a sieve into a basin, return it to same pan, reset on fire, add one pint hot milk, gently mix and let boil twenty minutes. Dilute two egg yolks with half gill cream and add it to the soup with a quarter ounce good butter; mix with wooden spoon while heating for five minutes, but do not allow to boil. Strain through cheesecloth into a soup tureen and serve.
A classical cream soup of the Escoffier school: asparagus, rice as the thickener, and an egg-and-cream liaison at the end. Everything hinges on the last step.
- The liaison must not boilOnce the yolks and cream go in, keep the pot below a simmer — around 175F. A boil scrambles the yolks and the soup turns grainy, and no amount of straining will rescue the texture.
- Old measuresA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of cream is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making two saltspoons a full half teaspoon of cayenne — enough to dominate a delicate soup. A quarter of that is closer to modern taste.
- Asparagus, thirty minutesThat length of boiling would ruin asparagus served as a vegetable, but here the tips are pureed and sieved, so softness is the point. The cost is colour: the finished soup goes olive rather than green. Blanching a handful of extra tips for two minutes and dropping them in at the end restores both colour and the classical garnish.
- Chicken bonesA pound of raw bones means backs, wings or a carcass — ask a butcher, or joint a chicken and use the frame. They are there for body and gelatin, not meat, and they come out at the sieve.
- The rice is structuralFour ounces of raw rice, a generous half cup, is the main thickener; the yolks and cream added at the end contribute a little more. Use a starchy short or medium grain and let it cook to complete collapse; the ninety-minute simmer is deliberate.
- ChervilA branch of chervil is hard to find fresh. Tarragon plus flat parsley is a workable stand-in, though tarragon is more assertive — use half as much.
- SievingThe recipe strains twice, once through a sieve to puree and again through cheesecloth at the end. Do both. A blender before the first sieve makes the work far shorter without changing the result.
- YieldHard to pin down: the asparagus liquor, a quart and a half of broth and a pint of milk come to something over three quarts before the long simmer takes its toll, enough for eight as a first course. Serve it in warmed cups; it will not tolerate reheating over direct heat once the liaison is in.
"Princesse" is not a description but a classical code word: in nineteenth-century French kitchen nomenclature, a dish garnished à la princesse means asparagus tips, and it attaches to everything from consommés to chicken breasts to garnished eggs. The soup here is a straightforward reading of that convention — asparagus liquor and tips, whitened with milk and cream, thickened with rice rather than flour, and finished with a yolk liaison. It is written in the terse ingredient-then-procedure style of the professional kitchen, and reads as a transcription of a standard from the French repertoire rather than an invention.