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Potage, Creme Reine
Cut the head off a small fowl, draw and wipe, then place it in a saucepan with two ounces raw bacon cut into small pieces, one sliced carrot, one sliced onion, two sliced leeks, three branches parsley, one branch chervil, one bay leaf, one saltspoon thyme, two cloves, three quarts water, a level tablespoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Cover the pan and let slowly boil for one hour and thirty minutes. Take up the fowl, skin and bone it, place in a mortar with two ounces bread crumbs, one ounce peeled almonds and pound to a paste. Mix in a saucepan one ounce butter with two and a half ounces flour and heat for two minutes, stirring meanwhile. Skim the fat from the surface of the broth and strain it through a strainer into the roux pan (butter and flour) and continually mix until it boils, then gradually add the pounded fowl, briskly mix while adding it, boil for fifteen minutes; then add one pint milk, lightly mix and boil for ten minutes. Dilute one egg yolk with a half gill cream, add to the cream, mix while heating without boiling for three minutes strain through a sieve into a basin, then through a cheesecloth into a soup tureen and serve.
A classic white almond-thickened chicken velouté, written for a kitchen with a mortar and a stockpot going all day. The method is sound; only the vocabulary and a few proportions need translating.
- The liaison is the hingeThe egg yolk and cream go in at the end and must be heated without boiling — three minutes at a bare steam, stirring. Let it reach a simmer and the yolk scrambles into threads that no amount of straining will fix.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the cayenne here is a generous half teaspoon and the thyme and nutmeg a quarter teaspoon each. A gill is half a cup, making the cream a scant quarter cup.
- "A small fowl"A fowl in 1900 meant a mature laying hen, tougher and far more flavourful than a broiler. A 3 to 3 1/2 lb stewing hen is the closest match; a supermarket roasting chicken of the same weight will work but gives a thinner broth, so start with less water or reduce it before straining.
- Pounding the meatA food processor does in thirty seconds what the mortar did in ten minutes. Blend the skinned, boned meat with the crumbs and almonds plus a ladle of hot broth to get a smooth paste rather than a dry crumble.
- AlmondsUse plain blanched sweet almonds. Historic recipes sometimes called for a bitter almond or two for perfume; that is not something to reproduce, and the soup does not need it.
- The roux is heavyThe roux is flour-heavy -- One ounce butter to two and a half ounces flour is a dry, sandy roux by modern standards. Equal weights — about 2 1/2 oz each — cooks out more cleanly.
- Double strainingThe final pass through a sieve and then cheesecloth catches the almond and crumb grit. Skip it and it stays suspended in the soup.
- YieldThree quarts of broth plus a pint of milk, reduced by the boiling, gives roughly ten to twelve first-course servings.
Potage à la reine — queen's soup — belongs to a family of white soups thickened with pounded almonds and bread that runs back through medieval European cookery, when ground almonds did the work later given to cream and flour. The name is traditionally attributed to a French queen's fondness for the dish, with Marguerite de Valois and Marie Leszczyńska both commonly named, though the attributions are folklore rather than record. Filippini's version, written from the Delmonico's tradition of classic French service, keeps the almonds and the bread crumbs, which is why this reads as an unusually old-fashioned soup.