WEEKEND COLUMNISTS We sell a lot of chicken at Le Café Anglais. Poor old Chris Fredericks, the besieged producer of Label Anglais chickens, is having a tough time keeping up the supply, as 30 or 40 birds a day are burnished to a rich golden-brown colour on our rotisseries.
I offer a whole chicken, a half chicken, breast of chicken and a humble chicken leg, but no matter how cheaply I sell the legs – and, therefore, no matter how much I charge for the breasts – the latter vastly outsell the former. Despite the likes of Albert Roux, Terence Conran and Simon Hopkinson plumping for the richly flavoured and juicier darker meat, most people still prefer the tender and milky breast.
This leaves me with a lot of chicken legs. There are only so many chicken legs that my staff are prepared to eat and the special chicken and ham pie on the Monday lunch menu makes only small inroads into the chicken leg mountain. Restaurant menus are best not used as a repository for leftovers – customers tend to view such things with a degree of mistrust – so I am reluctant therefore to deploy these unwanted limbs too profusely.
However, at home, roasting a chicken should only be the first stage of the relationship: it is an important rite but one sometimes appreciates the consequent salad, sandwich, risotto or soup even more. To my mind, the breast meat especially tastes better when served cold, wedged between two slices of crusty white bread with a smear of mayonnaise and sprigs of peppery watercress.
Chicken soup is really the apotheosis of the chicken, as a broth or as a luxuriant “cream” soup. The broth takes so many forms it is hard to know where to start. To it can be added pasta (small pieces of durum wheat pasta or billowy ravioli), barley in the best Arnold Wesker tradition, eggs (poached or whisked in a thin stream as in a straciatella) and vegetables, cut in small or large dice, in chunks or in strips. Chicken soup whether in China, eastern Europe, Colombia, France or even Scotland – let us not forget Cock-a-Leekie – is such a basic of almost every national cuisine that its permutations are limitless. The best, however, are made with great care, never being allowed to boil and skimmed assiduously.
A cream of chicken soup used to take a lot of effort. Pulverising cooked chicken in a mortar and then passing the result through a sieve was no easy matter; now, a good food processor will produce a smooth purée in seconds. The combination of easily accessed technology and the mass production of tinned cream of chicken soup are probably both responsible for denting the appetite for something that used to be rather a luxury.
To my mind, though, a simple cream soup is still a joy, its elegance founded in its very simplicity. The fact that it accommodates some of those unwanted legs is, of course, purely incidental.
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Cream of chicken soup
This recipe assumes that little was left on the chicken – if, in fact, a substantial amount of meat is left, the fresh legs can be dispensed with and the cooking time shortened to half an hour, ie just long enough to completely cook the rice.
Serves four.
Ingredients
2 onions
50g butter
2 chicken legs
1 glass of white wine
2 dessert-spoons rice
1 litre chicken stock
1 sprig of thyme
Salt and pepper
125ml double cream
Method
● Peel and slice the onions finely and stew them in the butter very gently. When they begin to soften, add the chicken legs and let them seal without taking any colour. Add the white wine, rice, the stock and a sprig of thyme and let them all simmer very gently for 45 minutes.
● When the soup is cooked, remove the chicken legs and, when cooled slightly, remove the meat from the bone and any remaining sinew and gristle. Put the meat back into the soup and put all into the bowl of an electric mixer. Blend until the mixture is absolutely smooth. Put the soup back in a pan and bring gently back to a simmer. Add the double cream and then taste for seasoning; it will almost certainly need more salt and perhaps a squeeze of lemon, just to cut the richness of the cream. Serve absolutely plain.
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