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Chicken Cream Broth
4 cups chicken stock 1/2 cup top milk 1 tablespoon chicken fat 1½ tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch Salt, pepper and mace to season Combine the chicken stock and top milk, bring to boiling point, thicken with the cornstarch and chicken fat creamed to. creamed together, season to taste and serve with croutons.
A cornstarch-thickened chicken velvet soup of the kind cornstarch companies promoted heavily in their promotional booklets. It comes together in under ten minutes, and the only technical point is how the starch goes in.
- Top milkBefore homogenization, the cream rose in the bottle and the "top milk" skimmed off it was considerably richer than the rest, roughly in the range of today's half-and-half. Use half-and-half, or equal parts whole milk and heavy cream.
- Argo or Kingsford'sBoth were cornstarch brands owned by the same corn products concern, which is why the booklet names them. Any plain cornstarch works; do not substitute corn flour or masa.
- The hinge: make a beurre manié, not a slurryThe hinge: make a beurre manié" -- "Creamed together" means the cornstarch is worked into the soft chicken fat to a smooth paste, then whisked into the hot liquid in small pieces. Dropping dry cornstarch into hot broth will give you lumps that are very hard to whisk out.
- Cook the starch outOnce the paste is in, keep it at a gentle simmer two to three minutes, whisking. Cornstarch does most of its thickening as the liquid approaches the boil, and undercooked starch tastes chalky. Do not hold it at a hard boil for long, which can thin it again.
- Chicken fatSkim it from the top of chilled stock, or buy rendered schmaltz. Butter substitutes cleanly if you have none, though it mutes the poultry flavor the recipe is after.
- MaceThe ground outer covering of nutmeg, milder and less sweet. A pinch is enough for four cups of liquid; more and it reads as dessert spice. Ground nutmeg used sparingly is the nearest substitute.
- YieldAbout four and a half cups, or four first-course servings. Serve it hot, since cornstarch-thickened soups set up and cloud as they cool.
- CroutonsCubes of stale bread crisped in butter or chicken fat. Add them at the table, not in the pot, or they dissolve into the soup.
Booklets like this one were published by cornstarch and cornflour manufacturers in the early twentieth century as advertising, which is why a brand name sits inside the ingredient list where an ordinary cookbook would just say "cornstarch." The dish itself belongs to a large family of light, thickened broths served as a dinner first course in the American middle-class dining room of that period, when a meal was expected to open with soup and the soup was expected to be smooth. Cornstarch was the modern answer to the older flour-and-butter roux: it thickened with less fat and cooked in minutes. The seasoning with mace rather than nutmeg or pepper alone is an older habit, common in English and American white soups since the eighteenth century, surviving here into a thoroughly commercial pamphlet.