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Venitienne Soup
Prepare a veal broth and let cool off. Beat up in a bowl three egg yolks with one and a third gills cream, add to the soup, mix well, set on the fire and continually mix until near boiling point, but do not allow to boil. Pour into a soup tureen and serve with six slices of toasted French bread and a little grated Parmesan cheese separately.
A classical egg-and-cream liaison built on veal broth. The whole recipe hinges on temperature control, and the original gives no quantity for the broth itself.
- The hinge: never let it boilEgg yolks begin to thicken around 150F and are set by roughly 165F. Stir constantly and take the soup no higher than about 175F, until it thickens enough to coat a spoon; boiling will curdle it into a grainy mess that is difficult to rescue. A heavy pan over low heat, or a bowl set over simmering water, gives you more margin.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so one and a third gills of cream is about two-thirds of a cup (160 ml). Use heavy cream; the fat is part of what keeps the yolks from tightening too fast.
- Broth quantityThe original never says how much veal broth. Three yolks and two-thirds cup cream will lightly thicken something in the region of 1 1/2 quarts (1.4 litres); more than that and the liaison will be thin.
- Temper the yolksWhisk a ladleful of the warm broth into the yolk-and-cream mixture before adding it to the pot, rather than pouring cold yolks into hot soup. The instruction to "let cool off" the broth is doing the same job by another route.
- Veal brothVeal bones can be hard to find. A light chicken stock, or a mix of chicken stock with a little roasted veal or pork bone, gives the neutral, faintly sweet base this soup wants. Avoid dark beef stock, which overwhelms the cream.
- French breadCut the bread into slices and toast or dry them until crisp. They are passed at the table with the cheese, not floated in the tureen, so they stay crunchy.
- Seasoning and yieldSeason the broth fully before the liaison goes in, since you cannot boil it afterwards to reduce or correct. Serves six as a first course, and it does not reheat well.
Dishes labelled vénitienne in turn-of-the-century French kitchens rarely had much to do with Venice; the name was one of a large stock of geographical tags that professional cooks used to distinguish one variation from another on a menu written in French. What defines this soup is the technique rather than the place: a liaison of egg yolks and cream stirred into a clear broth off the boil, the same finish used for a velouté or a blanquette sauce. Veal broth was the default neutral base of the classical repertoire, mild enough to carry cream and Parmesan without fighting them. The toast and grated cheese are served separately, leaving each diner to thicken the bowl to taste.