Queen's Soup
(Zuppa Regina) This is made with the white meat of chicken, which is to be ground in a meat grinder together with blanched almonds (5 or 6) for one quart of chicken. stock. To the meat and almond add some bread crumbs, first soaked in milk or broth, in the proportion of about one fifth of the quantity of the meat. All these ingredients are to be rubbed to a very smooth paste and hot broth is to be added to them. If you wish the soup to be richer and have a more milky consistency, use the yolk of an egg, which should be beaten, and have a few tablespoonfuls of hot broth stirred into it before adding to the soup. Do not let the soup boil after the egg is added or it will curdle.
One slice of stale bread may be cut into cubes, fried in deep fat, and the croutons put in the soup. Send it to the table with a dish of grated cheese. 7
A puréed almond-and-chicken soup that depends entirely on two things: a good broth and a genuinely smooth paste. The original assumes cooked chicken from a pot of stock already on the stove.
- The hinge: never boil after the eggOnce the tempered yolk goes in, hold the soup below a simmer — roughly 160-170F. A boil scrambles the yolk into threads and the milky body the recipe is after is gone for good.
- How much chicken"One quart of chicken" reads oddly to modern eyes; the phrase is ambiguous, but most likely means white meat to go with a quart of stock — in practice the meat from one large cooked breast, perhaps 6 to 8 oz. Use poached or leftover roast breast, not raw.
- Blanched almondsBlanched here means skinned, not toasted: pour boiling water over whole almonds, stand a minute, and slip the skins off. Five or six almonds per quart is a seasoning quantity, meant for perfume rather than thickening.
- Bread crumbs, by proportionAbout one fifth the quantity of the meat — so roughly 1 to 1.5 oz of soft crumbs from a stale loaf, soaked in milk or broth and squeezed out. Dry packaged crumbs will not soften into paste.
- Grinder and sieveA food processor replaces the meat grinder, but processed chicken stays slightly fibrous. Work it with a little broth, then push the paste through a fine sieve before it meets the rest of the stock if you want the smoothness the original insists on.
- TemperingBeat one yolk in a bowl, whisk in several tablespoons of hot broth a spoonful at a time, then return it to the pot off the heat. Adding a cold yolk straight to the pan is the usual way this soup fails.
- CroutonsThe recipe puts the fried bread cubes into the soup; add them at the last moment or hand them separately at the table, since they soften as they sit in hot liquid.
- Cheese and yieldThe grated cheese sent alongside was most likely Parmesan or another dry grating cheese. A quart of stock with this quantity of meat serves about four as a first course.
Zuppa regina — queen's soup — belongs to a long European family of pounded white-meat soups thickened with almonds and bread, the Italian cousin of French potage à la reine. Almond-and-capon purées appear in medieval and Renaissance cookery across Europe, when ground almonds were a standard thickener and white food was itself a mark of refinement; the same lineage produced blancmange. Which queen the name honors is not documented, and the attribution is generally treated as decorative rather than historical. Its presence in Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) reflects the frugal logic of a kitchen that kept a stockpot going: the chicken has already given its broth, and the breast meat is put back to work as the body of the soup, with a yolk standing in for cream.