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Cream of Barley Soup
(Vienna.) Cook 2 ounces barley, 2 onions, and 2 carrots, sliced, 1 bayleaf, and some parsley, for 3 hours, in 2 quarts veal or chicken stock. Add yolks of 2 eggs and 1 cup of hot milk, and press through a sieve. Season and add 1 cup of asparagus tips or green peas, already cooked.
A Viennese barley soup thickened the old way, with egg yolks rather than a roux. Two things need attention: the barley timing and the moment the yolks go in.
- The hinge: never boil after the yolksBeat the yolks with the hot milk, temper them with a ladle of hot soup, then stir the mixture in off the heat. Anything above about 180F will scramble them and the soup will look grainy no matter how hard you sieve it.
- Three hours is for hulled barleyThree hours is a long time for barley — Modern pearl barley is done in 45 to 60 minutes and will disintegrate long before three hours. Hulled or pot barley wants 90 minutes or more. Either way, cook until it collapses easily under a spoon, then move on.
- 2 ounces of barleyAbout a third of a cup dry. It looks like nothing against 2 quarts of stock, but the grain is there to give body once sieved, not to be a garnish.
- Watch the liquidA long open simmer will take 2 quarts down considerably. Keep a lid ajar and top up with stock or water so you finish with roughly the volume you started with, or the soup turns to porridge.
- Sieve, or blendPressing through a sieve was the only route to smoothness when this was written. A blender or stick blender does it in seconds; pass it through a fine sieve afterward if you want the texture the original intends. Remove the bayleaf and parsley stems first.
- Veal stockVeal stock gives the pale, gelatinous body this soup was built on. Chicken stock is the stated alternative and works; use unsalted or low-sodium so you can season at the end as directed.
- The green garnishAsparagus tips or peas go in already cooked and only need warming through. A minute in the finished soup is enough — longer and they grey out and lose the point of them.
- YieldServes 6 as a first course, 4 as a light main. Season assertively with salt and white pepper; a scrape of nutmeg suits the soup if you want it.
Barley soup is one of the oldest things in the Central European repertoire, and Gerstensuppe in its many forms was everyday food in Austrian kitchens long before it was written down for foreign readers. The finish here is a yolk-and-hot-milk liaison passed through a sieve, which lets a cook call a soup "cream of" without using any cream at all. The recipe's appearance here, tagged simply "(Vienna.)", is set down in the compressed, assume-competence style of the period, which is why it tells you to press through a sieve but never mentions that the eggs must not boil.