Egg Soup
(Monte Carlo.) Cut 6 slices of stale bread and dip them lightly in sugar. Put them in the oven to brown, and have ready 1 pint of white stock and 1 pint of boiling milk, blended with the yolks of 3 eggs and 1 ounce of butter. Add salt, pepper, and nutmeg and a spoonful of chopped parsley. Pour over the slices of toast and serve, after keeping hot, ten minutes.
A French-style potage lié — a broth thickened with egg yolks and poured over sweetened toast. The whole dish hinges on keeping the yolks below the point where they scramble.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the yolks go in, the soup must not come back to a simmer or it will curdle into threads. Whisk the yolks and softened butter together, temper them with a ladle of the hot milk, then return everything to the pan and hold it at 170-180F, stirring, until it thickens to the consistency of thin cream.
- "Keeping hot, ten minutes"Ten minutes over direct heat will break the liaison; the instruction most likely presumes a bain-marie or the cool end of a range. Set the pan in a wider pan of hot water, off the heat, if you need to hold it.
- White stockA pale unroasted stock of veal or chicken, made without browning the bones or aromatics. Any light chicken stock works; avoid a dark, reduced brown stock, which fights the milk and the nutmeg.
- Browning the toastNo temperature is given. 350F for 10-12 minutes dries the sugared bread and lightly caramelises it; watch it, since sugar on the surface colours fast. Stale bread is specified because fresh bread turns to pulp under a pint of liquid.
- Sugar with salt and pepperNot an error. The sweetened toast against the savoury custard is deliberate, in the same family as the sugar-and-cinnamon toasts served with older milk soups. Dip lightly — a heavy coating makes the finished bowl cloying.
- NutmegGrate it fresh over the pan at the end. Pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its aroma and this soup has little else to carry flavour beyond stock, milk and butter.
- QuantitiesOne ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons. If the pints are imperial (20 fluid ounces), that is roughly 2 1/2 US cups of each liquid; measured as US pints the soup comes out slightly thicker, which is no harm.
- YieldSix slices of toast, six servings, as a light first course. It does not reheat — the yolks will separate on a second heating.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a turn-of-the-century genre of travel cookbooks in which an American or British writer collects dishes gathered abroad and attributes each to the place it was eaten; the parenthetical "(Monte Carlo.)" here is a souvenir label rather than a claim of local invention. The dish itself is a straightforward French potage lié, a broth finished with egg yolks and butter, poured over bread — a technique that descends from the much older family of panades and soupes, in which the word soup originally meant the sop of bread, not the liquid. Egg-and-milk soups of this kind were widely regarded in the period as invalid and convalescent food, nourishing and easily swallowed, of a piece with beef tea and barley water. The sweetened toast is the detail that dates it: sugar and pepper sat far more comfortably in the same bowl before the nineteenth century finished sorting courses into sweet and savoury.