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Lemon Soup, Liee
Singe, cut off head and draw a tender two-and-a-half-pound chicken, place it in a saucepan with a sliced carrot, an onion with two cloves stuck in it, two leeks, one branch each celery, parsley and chervil, a sprig each of thyme and bay leaf. Pour in four quarts water, season with a good teaspoon salt, let slowly boil for one and a half hours, take up chicken, place it on a plate and keep for to-morrow's luncheon. Reduce broth to one and a half quarts, skim fat off surface, strain it through cheesecloth into another saucepan and squeeze in juice of a lemon. Dilute one egg yolk with a half gill cream, add it to soup and sharply mix with a whisk while cooking for two minutes, but do not allow to boil. Pour the soup into a tureen and serve with six slices toasted French bread and a little grated Parmesan cheese separately.
A classic egg-and-cream liaison built on a chicken broth made from scratch, with the boiled bird set aside for another meal. The technique is simple; the temperature control is not.
- Never let it boilOnce the yolk and cream go in, the soup must stay below a simmer — around 170-180F — while you whisk. A boil will scramble the yolk and leave the soup grainy and separated instead of smooth.
- "Liee" explainedFrom the French lier, to bind: a soup finished with a liaison of egg yolk and cream rather than flour. The thickening is barely perceptible; expect a silky broth, not anything approaching a cream soup.
- A half gill of creamA gill is half a cup, so a half gill is 4 tablespoons. Use heavy cream — the fat protects the yolk from curdling.
- The chicken"Singe, cut off head and draw" assumes a bird bought whole and undressed. Any dressed 2 1/2 lb chicken works; at that weight a modern supermarket bird is usually labelled a fryer.
- The reduction is the real workFour quarts of water down to a quart and a half is a serious reduction. The hour and a half of gentle boiling will not get you there — plan on another hour or more at a steady simmer after the chicken is lifted out, uncovered.
- Chervil and leeksChervil is seasonal and fades fast; a little tarragon plus extra parsley reads closest if you cannot find it. Split and wash the leeks thoroughly, grit sinks into the layers and will end up in the broth.
- Salt at the endThe teaspoon of salt is measured against four quarts of water. Reducing to a quart and a half concentrates it, so taste and correct the seasoning once the reduction is done.
- Yield and serviceSix slices of toast implies six portions, though the quart and a half stretches further as a first course. Pass the toast and grated Parmesan at the table as instructed rather than floating them, or the soup thickens into porridge.
- Tomorrow's luncheonThe poached chicken is genuinely worth keeping — cool it quickly, refrigerate, and use it within two days for salad or croquettes. Do not leave it standing on a plate at room temperature as the original assumes.
The yolk-and-lemon finish here is the same idea as Greek avgolemono and Turkish terbiye, which are often traced to a shared eastern Mediterranean habit of sharpening and binding broth in a single step. The book is doing what a great many English-language cookbooks did in the first decades of the twentieth century: presenting French professional method as the neutral standard while gathering dishes from elsewhere around it. The instruction to save the boiled fowl for the next day's luncheon is the more revealing detail — a chicken was bought whole, dressed at home, and expected to yield two separate meals.