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Potage, Veloute Au Riz
Procure one pound raw chicken trimmings or bones, place in a large saucepan with one ounce butter and cook fifteen minutes, but not too brown, add one sliced carrot, one sliced onion, two leeks and two bay leaves; moisten with one quart broth and two quarts water; season with two teaspoons salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and saltspoon grated nutmeg; lightly mix and boil forty minutes, then add three ounces raw rice, continually simmer forty-five minutes more, remove, pass potage through sieve into a basin, then through a Chinese strainer into another saucepan, set on fire, let come to a boil; dilute two egg yolks with a gill cream and juice of half a lemon, add to soup with half ounce good butter, sharply mix with a whisk while heating four minutes, but do not allow to boil. Pour the soup into a tureen and serve with a plate of bread croutons separately.
A classic velouté: chicken broth thickened with rice, sieved smooth, then finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. Everything hinges on the last four minutes.
- Do not let the liaison boilOnce the egg yolks, cream and lemon go in, hold the soup below a simmer — roughly 160–180F — whisking constantly. A boil curdles the yolks and the smooth body is gone for good.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup. A saltspoon is usually reckoned at an eighth to a quarter teaspoon, so the two saltspoons of cayenne come to roughly a half teaspoon and the nutmeg to a quarter teaspoon or less — assertive but not punishing. Three ounces of rice is a scant half cup.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. A regular fine sieve lined with a double layer of cheesecloth does the same job; the double straining is what gives a velouté its texture.
- Chicken trimmingsWings, backs, necks and carcass bones all work. Ask a butcher, or save the frame from a roast bird. Browning them in butter for fifteen minutes builds the flavor, so keep the heat moderate and stop short of dark color.
- LeeksTwo leeks means the whole white and pale green, split and washed hard — grit settles in the layers and sieving will not remove the taste of it.
- Reduction and yieldThree quarts of liquid simmered for well over an hour reduces considerably; the recipe gives no yield, but something in the region of two quarts of finished soup is a reasonable expectation. If it thickens past the consistency of heavy cream while the rice cooks, add hot water before straining.
- Lemon lastThe lemon juice goes in with the yolks and cream, off the boil. Added earlier to hot broth it flattens, and acid in a boiling liquid makes the yolks more likely to break.
- CroutonsSmall cubes of white bread fried in butter or toasted dry, passed separately so they stay crisp rather than dissolving into the soup.
Velouté means "velvety," and in the French kitchen of the nineteenth century it named both a mother sauce and a class of soups built on the same principle: a light stock, a starch to give it body, and a finish of egg yolks and cream. Here the body comes from rice cooked to collapse and forced through a sieve rather than from a flour roux. The double straining and the timed liaison suggest a professionally trained hand, and pages like this one read as restaurant kitchen practice written out for a domestic reader. The rice-thickened velouté survives today mostly under other names, in the many cream soups that use potato or rice instead of flour.