Queen Soup
This is said to have been invented for Marie Stuart by the royal cook when she lived in France as dauphiness. It was a favorite with both Victoria and Napoleon Bonaparte. Cook 2 large onions with 2 pieces of celery, both cut up, in 2 ounces of butter. Add some parsley, thyme, and a bayleaf, 1 chicken cut into joints, and 2 quarts of water. Simmer for 4 hours. Take out the chicken, cut the meat of the wings and breast into dice, and keep the dark meat for croquettes or salad. Chop one dozen blanched almonds, the yolks of 2 hard-boiled eggs, and 2 slices of bread soaked in milk. Pound these with the meat and press through a sieve; add to the soup, strained, 1 cup of boiling cream or rich milk, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Serve at once, hot.
An old-style white chicken pottage thickened with pounded almonds, egg yolk and bread rather than flour. The method is straightforward; the main adjustments are the cooking time and the pounding.
- Don't boil after the cream goes inThe soup is thickened with pounded almonds, hard yolk and bread. Once the cream is stirred in, keep it below a simmer; a hard boil can split the dairy and make the almond paste grainy. Heat the cream separately, as directed, and combine off the boil.
- Four hours is too longA modern chicken is younger and smaller than the fowl this was written for. Two quarts of water and a jointed 3-4 lb bird give a good broth in 90 minutes to 2 hours; four hours will leave the breast meat dry and stringy, and it is the breast you need for the purée.
- The poundingA mortar was assumed. A food processor does the same work in under a minute: blitz the almonds, the two cooked yolks, the squeezed-out milk-soaked bread and the diced white meat to a paste, then push it through a sieve to catch almond grit.
- Blanched almondsSkins on will speckle the soup grey and add tannin. Pour boiling water over whole almonds, stand two minutes, and the skins slip off. A dozen almonds is roughly 15 g.
- Bread soaked in milkUse a plain white loaf, crusts off, and wring the slices out before pounding, or the soup will be slack. Modern sandwich bread tends to be softer and wetter than the bread this was written for; two slices is a guide, not a rule.
- Strain the stock properlyThe instruction to add the purée "to the soup, strained" means the broth goes through a fine sieve or cloth first, leaving the onion, celery and herbs behind. Skim the fat as well; the recipe does not mention it.
- SeasoningNutmeg here is a period marker rather than a garnish -- grate it fresh and keep it faint. Salt at the end, after reduction, since two quarts simmering down concentrates whatever went in early.
- YieldAbout six servings as a first course. The dark meat is genuinely surplus; the recipe assumes a household that will use it the next day.
This is potage à la reine, a white almond-and-poultry soup securely attested in print in the French repertoire from the seventeenth century, with an earlier origin often claimed rather than shown, and that English cookbooks anglicised as "Queen soup" or "soup à la reine." The attribution to Mary Stuart's cook is traditional rather than documented -- the same story is attached to several dishes bearing the word reine, and the almond-thickened white pottage is older than Mary's years in France. What is real in the recipe is its method: pounded almonds, hard yolk and soaked bread as a binder rather than roux or cornflour, a technique inherited from medieval cookery, where ground almonds stood in for dairy on fast days and gave a dish the pale colour that signalled refinement at table. A travel-minded book like this one carries such a soup partly for the flavour and largely for the story, which the compiler passes on with a careful "this is said to have been."