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Cream of Chicken Soup
Into a saucepan put one heaping tablespoonful of butter and the same amount of flour and mix over the fire; add one pint of milk and stir until it thickens. Add one quart of strong chicken stock, season to taste, and simmer for fifteen minutes. Then draw to one side, add the yolks of two eggs beaten with one cupful of cream and one cupful of very finely minced breast of roast or boiled chicken. Take at once from the fire and serve.
A classic velouté-style cream soup: a milk-thickened roux extended with stock, finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. The finish is the whole point, and it is where the recipe can fail.
- The liaison is the hingeOnce the beaten yolks and cream go in, the soup must not return to a boil or the yolks will curdle into threads. Temper them first with a ladle of hot soup, then stir the mixture back off the heat; hold the finished soup below about 180F if it has to wait.
- Egg safetyThe yolks are cooked only by the residual heat of the soup, which in most cases will carry them into the safe range if the base is properly hot when they go in. It is not guaranteed, since a cup of cold cream and a cup of cold chicken go in at the same time and the pan is already off the heat; if the base has cooled, warm it back to a bare simmer before tempering, and use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone vulnerable.
- QuantitiesOne pint is 2 cups of milk, one quart is 4 cups of stock; a heaping tablespoon of butter is roughly 1 oz. That roux is on the light side for six cups of liquid, so expect a thin, pourable soup rather than a thick one.
- "Strong chicken stock"This means a well-reduced homemade stock with real body, not commercial broth. If using boxed stock, reduce a quart and a half down to a quart to concentrate it, and salt at the end since reduction concentrates the salt too.
- Cook out the roux"Mix over the fire" means stirring butter and flour together for a minute or two before the milk goes in, long enough to lose the raw-flour taste without taking colour.
- The chickenBreast from a roast or poached bird, minced very fine — nearly a paste — so it suspends rather than sinks. About 5 oz of cooked meat fills a cup. Adding it at the end keeps it tender; boiled in, it turns stringy.
- Seasoning'To taste' here would take salt and white pepper, and nutmeg or a blade of mace simmered in the stock is a common period pairing. Season before the liaison, then correct once, since cream mutes salt.
- YieldRoughly eight cups finished, serving six to eight as a first course.
Cream of chicken soup as written here is a domesticated version of the French velouté, thickened first with a roux and then enriched at the last moment with a liaison of egg yolk and cream — a technique that runs back through nineteenth-century professional cookery to Carême's classification of the grandes sauces. Its appearance in a general household book shows how far restaurant method had travelled into domestic kitchens: the writer assumes a cook who keeps strong stock on hand and has cold roast chicken to use up, and gives no warning about boiling the liaison. The call for the breast of the bird points the same way — white meat, finely minced, was associated with dishes fit for company.