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Cressoniere, Illinoise
Remove all the leaves from a bunch of fresh watercress, plunge and keep them in fresh water till required. Heat in a saucepan an ounce melted butter, adding one pound raw chicken bones, half a sliced carrot, one small sliced onion, two sliced leeks, two branches parsley, the water-cress stalks, two cloves and one bay leaf; brown very gently for fifteen minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Moisten with three quarts hot water or broth. Season with a tablespoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg; lightly mix and let boil for fifty minutes. Heat in a saucepan a half ounce butter, drain and add the watercress leaves, then continually stir while cooking for three minutes. Strain the broth through a cheesecloth into this pan, add two ounces raw rice and slowly boil for thirty minutes more. Dilute one egg yolk in one gill cream, add to the soup, and constantly mix with the spatula while heating without boiling for three minutes. Pour into a soup tureen, add six small slices toasted French bread and serve.
A classic French watercress soup built on a quick chicken-bone broth, thickened at the end with rice and finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. The finish is where it succeeds or curdles.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the yolk and cream go in, the soup must never boil. Temper the mixture with a ladle of hot soup first, return it off the heat, and hold it below about 180F while stirring for the three minutes given. A boil scrambles the yolk and the soup turns grainy.
- 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 grated nutmeg. Two ounces of rice is about 1/3 cup raw.
- SaltA full tablespoon of salt is aimed at three quarts of unsalted water and raw bones. If you moisten with commercial broth, add a teaspoon at the start and correct at the end instead.
- Chicken bonesA pound of raw bones means backs, wings and necks, not cooked carcass scraps. Butchers will sell them; wings alone work and give more body.
- Watercress in two partsThe stalks go into the browning aromatics and are strained out with the bones; only the leaves, sweated three minutes in butter, stay in the soup. Do not chop the leaves in with the stems at the start or the green flavour cooks away over the fifty-minute simmer.
- Browning gentlyFifteen minutes of gentle browning is for colour and sweetness, not caramel. Keep the heat moderate and stir; scorched bones make the finished broth bitter.
- StrainingCheesecloth matters because the soup is served unpuréed and clear-bodied apart from the rice. A fine mesh sieve lined with a doubled cloth is the modern equivalent.
- Yield and serviceThree quarts of liquid, reduced over the roughly eighty minutes of boiling the recipe gives, yields six servings, which matches the six slices of toast. Serve the toast on the side rather than in the tureen if you would rather it stayed crisp.
Cressonière is French kitchen shorthand for a dish made with cresson, watercress, and by the late nineteenth century it named a family of preparations from a clear garnished broth to a thick potato-and-cress purée. This version belongs to the restaurant tradition of the period: a small quantity of bones and vegetables sweated in butter to build a broth in under an hour, rice for body instead of flour, and an egg-yolk-and-cream liaison to finish, all techniques a hotel kitchen could turn out to order. The place name tacked on to it is a habit of this book, which attaches American states and cities to numerous otherwise French preparations; the spelling "Illinoise" may be a French hand at work on an American word. Watercress itself was a cheap, widely available green in that era, harvested from running water near cities and sold in bunches by street vendors, which is why it appears in so many soups of the time.