Chicken Soup
(As made in Nice.) Cook 1 ounce of ham with 1 1/2 quarts of chicken broth for 1/2 hour. Add 1 cup of young carrots cut into dice, 1 dozen small white onions, and 1 cup of turnips, cut into dice, all cooked previously, also two tablespoonfuls of cooked shredded cabbage, the meat from breast and wings cut into dice, and 2 tablespoonfuls of boiled rice. Strain the soup before adding the vegetables and chicken, season it, and serve.
A garnish soup rather than a boiled-together one: everything that goes into the bowl is cooked separately, and the broth is strained clear before it meets them. Read the order of operations before you start, because the recipe states it out of sequence.
- The hinge: strain first, then garnishThe ham simmers in the broth for flavour, then the broth is strained. Only after straining do the vegetables, chicken and rice go in. If you add the garnish before straining you lose the point of the dish, which is a clear amber broth with distinct diced vegetables suspended in it.
- Quantities and yield1 1/2 quarts is 6 cups of broth, which reduces somewhat over the half-hour simmer. This serves four to six as a first course.
- The hamOne ounce is a single thick slice or a scrap of the end. Its job is to season the broth, not to be eaten; use a dry-cured ham with some fat on it (prosciutto end, country ham, speck) rather than sandwich ham, which will give the broth little but salt.
- Small white onionsThese are what are now sold as pearl or pickling onions, about an inch across. A dozen in six cups of broth is generous but correct for the style; they are meant to be encountered whole. Boil them until just tender before they go in, and peel them after a brief blanching to save your patience.
- Young carrots and turnipsBoth are called for diced and "cooked previously," meaning boiled or steamed separately until barely tender so they hold their edges. Cut them to a uniform 1/4-inch dice; the turnips want the shorter cooking of the two.
- Cabbage and riceTwo tablespoons of each, which sounds like nothing and is deliberate. The cabbage should be shredded fine and boiled separately, since simmering cabbage in the broth would flavour the whole pot. The rice is plain boiled, added at the end so it does not cloud the soup with starch.
- The chickenBreast and wing meat from the bird that made the broth. If you are working from purchased stock, poach a bone-in breast in it for 20 minutes at a bare simmer, lift it out, and dice the meat once cool enough to handle.
- Seasoning"Season it" is left to the cook because the ham does much of the work. Salt at the very end, after the ham has been strained out, and finish with white pepper.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea collected dishes from the kitchens of other countries for American readers, and the parenthetical "(As made in Nice.)" is doing the same work as a modern regional label. What is described is essentially a consommé garni in the French manner: a clarified broth served with a small, deliberate assortment of separately cooked garnishes, a technique codified in professional French cookery through the nineteenth century and named according to what floated in it. Nice at the turn of the century was Italian in memory and French in administration, which is a reasonable explanation for the rice and the cured pork sitting beside the carrots, turnips and pearl onions of a French garnish. The recipe also quietly assumes the thrift of a household that had just poached a chicken: the breast and wings are diced into the soup, and the rest of the bird is presumed to have gone somewhere else.