Regent's Soup
(England.) Add to the bones, stuffing, gravy, and trimmings of cold roast duck or game, 2 quarts of beef stock, 1 carrot, 1 onion, 1 turnip, 1 head of celery all cut up, 4 ounces of barley, parsley, thyme, and a clove. Simmer 2 hours, press through a sieve, season to taste, add the pounded yolks of 3 hard-boiled eggs, half a cup of boiling milk, and a glass of sherry.
A Victorian carcass soup, thickened three ways at once: barley, sieved vegetables and pounded egg yolk. The instructions assume you already know how a sieved soup behaves, so a few things are worth setting out.
- The hinge: sieve while hot, then don't boil againBarley and root vegetables only push through a sieve while they are hot and soft; let the pot cool and you will be scraping. Once the egg yolks and milk go in, keep the soup below a simmer or the yolk will curdle into specks rather than smoothing the body.
- A head of celeryIn 1900 this means the whole bunch, not one rib. Trim the base and the coarsest tops and cut the lot up; it is the main aromatic here alongside the onion.
- Barley4 ounces is a generous half cup if pearl barley is meant, though the recipe says only 'barley'. It swells considerably in two hours and does much of the thickening once sieved.
- A glass of sherryPeriod cookbooks use a wine glass, commonly reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, but the measure was never fixed. Start with less than that in 2 quarts of soup and taste; add it off the heat so the aroma survives.
- The stuffingOld duck stuffing was usually sage and onion, sometimes heavily salted. It will carry seasoning into the pot, so season only at the end as directed rather than at the start.
- A cloveOne clove, the spice, for the whole 2 quarts. It is a background note, not a flavour; more will dominate the duck.
- Bones and trimmingsA single duck carcass with skin, gravy and scraps appears to be the intended quantity.
- YieldSomewhat less than the starting 2 quarts after two hours' simmering and sieving, even with the milk and sherry added. It thickens further on standing; loosen with stock, not water.
The name belongs to the vocabulary of Regency and post-Regency grand cookery, in which dishes were labelled for the Prince Regent, later George IV, in whose Brighton kitchens Carême served. The construction here is thoroughly English household practice rather than court practice: a roast bird was expected to yield a second meal from its frame, and the standard route was stock, root vegetables, a thickening grain and a sieve. The pounded hard-boiled yolk is an older thickener than roux, common in English and French cooking well before the eighteenth century, and it survives in this kind of recipe precisely because it enriches without needing further cooking. Adelaide Keen collected the dish for With a Saucepan Over the Sea (1902), a book of national recipes gathered country by country, which is why it carries the bare tag "(England.)" at its head.