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Potage, Mikado
Cut half of a small breast of chicken, quarter of a pound lean raw veal and quarter pound of lean raw mutton into small dice pieces, place in a saucepan on the fire with one ounce butter and cook for five minutes, stirring with the spatula meanwhile. Then moisten with two and a half quarts white broth, add a finely chopped, medium onion, one green pepper chopped the same way and one and a half tablespoons diluted curry. Tie in a bunch one leek, two branches celery two ditto parsley, one chervil, one bay leaf, one sprig thyme, one clove and one bean garlic, and add to the soup. Season with a heavy teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Cook slowly forty minutes, add three tablespoons raw rice, cook thirty minutes longer. Remove the herbs, etc., skim fat from surface, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A three-meat curried rice soup in the French service style: fond blanc, a bouquet garni, and curry powder slaked before it goes in. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the terms and timings need translating.
- White brothFond blanc is an unsalted light stock made from veal and/or poultry bones without browning. Two and a half quarts of a good low-sodium chicken stock is the practical substitute; because the recipe adds a heavy teaspoon of salt of its own, avoid anything already seasoned.
- "Diluted curry"Curry powder stirred to a loose paste with a few spoons of cold stock or water before it enters the pot. Doing this matters: dry powder dropped into hot liquid clumps and keeps a raw, chalky edge. The recipe gives no ratio of powder to liquid, so the tablespoon and a half is of the slaked mixture, not of dry powder.
- One bean of garlicA single clove, not a head. The usage appears in period cookbooks and may reflect the French gousse, which also means a pod, though the derivation is not documented.
- One chervilA sprig or small branch, tied into the bouquet with the leek, celery, parsley, bay, thyme and clove. If chervil is unavailable, leave it out rather than substituting parsley twice over.
- The rice timingThirty minutes will reduce modern long-grain white rice to threads and cloud the soup. Add it about 18 minutes before serving, or cook it separately and spoon it into the tureen if you want distinct grains.
- Heat level"Cook slowly" means a bare simmer with the surface barely moving. The diced veal and mutton go tough and the broth turns muddy at a rolling boil, and you cannot skim fat cleanly from agitated liquid.
- Green pepperA sweet bell pepper, not a chile. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American books generally use "green pepper" for the mild sort.
- YieldTwo and a half quarts of broth before reduction serves eight to ten as a first course. It reheats well, though the rice will continue to swell overnight.
This belongs to a large family of turn-of-the-century hotel soups given "oriental" names on the strength of curry powder and rice: Potage Indienne, Mulligatawny, Potage Orientale, and this one, borrowing the title Mikado — the honorific for the Japanese emperor, a word current in English well before Gilbert and Sullivan's 1885 operetta popularised it, and thereafter attached to fans, teacups, hair ribbons and dishes with no Japanese content whatever. The soup itself is straightforwardly French in construction, from the fond blanc and the tied bouquet down to the instruction to serve from a tureen, and the curry reaches it by way of the Anglo-Indian kitchen rather than anywhere further east. The three-meat mix of chicken breast, veal and mutton reflects a professional kitchen with all three on hand as trimmings.