You ever write a sentence and just say to yourself: “Why am I like this?” WHY HELLO THERE, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, where I’ll put the S on the end if I want, because it’s a holiday. Or, rather, WAS a holiday. (Sorry about that: I got snowed in Friday/Saturday, and decided to play it safe on Sunday, so I didn’t get to GO shopping for the ingredients until Monday evening, at which point there was no time to make it until today.)  It was Presidents’ Day, which yes, is how my state spells it, we’ll get into that, and today’s dish of choice is potage a la Reine for reasons that will ALSO be explained. You can skip all that with this link (or just, you know, scrolling, the word “recipe” is very large near the bottom). Everyone else, let’s dig in.

I Prefer to Abide where I Reside than Preside

So, Presidents’ Day, one of a select few American holidays where America does not agree on what it is celebrating, or what the day is. At the Federal level, the holiday is, specifically, “Washington’s Birthday”, where it is scheduled in such a way that it can never actually land on Washington’s birthday. (Washington was born February 22nd, and President’s Day is “the third Monday of February”, which, at the latest, would be the 21st.)

“How kind of you all to arrive so early to the festivities. I see you also brought nothing for presents.”

Which is kind of funny, but it gets EVEN FUNNIER when you add in how a bunch of states do it. First off, there are 14 different official names for the holiday, because a bunch of different states have VERY SLIGHT differences. Like, Presidents’ Day (The plural possessive) is what it’s called in the plurality of states, but there is also President’s Day (singular possessive) in quite a few, Presidents Day (the plural), and MORE. A big part of this while a lot of states use the day to honor George Washington, other states include Abraham Lincoln, whose Birthday, February 12th, is ALSO not a potential date the holiday can land on!  Alabama, wildly, uses the Day to honor Washington and JEFFERSON, which sounds like an incredibly Alabama thing to do (“Fuck Lincoln, let’s honor Jefferson instead. Show those Yankees, damn it), and even MORE SO when you learn that Thomas Jefferson’s birthday is in APRIL. They went TWO MONTHS out of their way to avoid honoring Lincoln. Arkansas calls it “George Washington and Daisy Bates Day”, which who the HE-what’s that? Daisy Bates was a civil rights activist, and the personal guide and mentor of the Little Rock Nine, who forced the desegregation of Arkansas’ Central High School? …Alright, Arkansas. You win this round.

Probably the best possible option.

Anywho, so we’ve got a holiday that, in my state at least, honors two Presidents whose birthday it CANNOT fall on. And that felt like a SLAM DUNK opportunity to write up a recipe from a cookbook I found at a used bookstore: “The First Ladies’ Cookbook”, a book written in the 60’s, detailing the dining habits of the various presidents, and including a couple recipes emblematic of their time in office. Boom. Easy. Cook something Presidential for President’s day. What’s the cookbook got? Lessee, Washington…Beefsteak and Kidney pie? Nuh-uh. A Trifle? Normally good, but I JUST did 2 desserts. Chess Cake same problem. Okay, Washington is a bust. What about Lincoln? Let’s see…Chicken Fricassee? That’s just fried chicken in a sauce, basically. Election Cake? Too many desserts. Scalloped Oysters? YOU KNOW WHAT? Obviously these two aren’t the play. 

Oooh. Wait. Washington was the 1st president…Lincoln was the 16th...Presidents’ Day is basically splitting the difference between them…Who was the 8th President? Martin Van Buren? THAT, perhaps surprisingly, is a well that I am HAPPY to tap, for a couple reasons.

Van Buren, Van Buren, Van Buren for You

Martin Van Buren is a president RIFE with fun little details. For instance, Martin Van Buren is the only President (so far) for whom English was a SECOND language: while born in New York, he was raised in a Dutch community, so Dutch was his first language. AND HOW CONVENIENT FOR ME that little detail is, since it allowed me to make this our MONTHLY PATREON TIE-IN POST! Actually, it’s NOT convenient, as I am massively behind on uploading those Patreon posts, but THAT’S A PROBLEM FOR FUTURE JON. This month’s Box is the Netherlands, and I should hopefully have it up in the next week or so. (Assuming this new audio format works.) We didn’t have one last month, because right now the boxes are a month behind, so we would have had to do the holiday box (the boxes are a month behind because we often don’t get the box itself until around the 20th, and it tends to take about a week to get my family to sit down for an hour and try things, but we might work on speeding up that turn-around.)

Anywho, Martin Van Buren is a WEIRD mixture of elitist and humility. Like, he directly followed Andrew Jackson, who was FAMOUS for being a weird mixture of aggressive and affable: today, we remember him as a ferocious dueler, a guy who had to pulled off from beating and an attempted assassin, an absolute SCOURGE on Native Americans, and a man whose only regrets were men he DIDN’T kill. He was also a man HEAVILY invested in “the people”, renowned for holding frequent levees and receptions, where thousands of people of all walks of life (cough cough as long as you’re white cough) could come and see the White House, and the Cabinet members, shake hands with the President, etc. He famously had a giant wheel of cheese left in the White House foyer (By giant, I mean, “in excess of 1,000 pounds”) that was a gift. He paid off the national debt…and then almost immediately caused a banking crisis. He opposed the Electoral College, insisting every year that it should be repealed…and also hated abolitionists, who he thought were ‘tearing the country apart’ by picking aggressive fights with the South over slavery. He created a system where people had to be removed from their positions with new administrations in order to prevent long-term corruption…which ended up creating the “spoils” system, where newly elected presidents hand out jobs to friends, donors, family, etc, as a form of blatant SHORT-TERM corruption. He was, in short, a huge chaotic mess.

A mess with surprisingly gentle eyes, for someone who once almost beat a man to death with this cane.

Martin Van Buren, on the other hand, grew up in a tavern. He was a quiet man, who had been a widower for 18 years. He ended the weekly receptions, and spent several months having the carpets replaced, the floors and china repaired, and so on. He was a one-term president, in large part due to having to deal with messes left by Jackson, such as the aforementioned banking crisis, the Second Seminole War (which occurred because of Jackson’s policies), and his refusal to admit Texas to the Union (since it would upset the balance of slave-states versus free states) as well as, and this is something I never heard about in school, a brief budding war with Canada, all led to him being dubbed “Martin Van Ruin”, getting ousted in his second election, after which he went back to New York, made a couple attempts at possibly being elected again, and then retired to farming for 14 years.

At the same time, one of the big political events of his term was the “Gold Spoon Oration”, where a Representative from Pennsylvania, Charles Ogle, lambasted Van Buren for THREE DAYS on the amount of money he was spending on updating and beautifying the White House, how he always wore the best fashions, and how he held fancy dinner parties with elites, where they dined on rich and fabulous cuisine on golden spoons. All of which was TRUE…but rather one-sided. See, those were Van Buren’s spoons. He’d bought them himself, before coming to the White House. He wore the best fashions because he bought his own clothes. And the reason Ogle knew about the fancy dinner parties is because HE WAS ONE OF THE ELITES. Van Buren’s retort to being asked if Ogle was telling the truth about the spoons being gold was “he ought to know; they have been in his mouth many times.”

What historians called a classic “Martin Van BURN”.

And it’s specifically THAT oration that forms the root of today’s dish. Because, of the fancy dishes that were supposedly served at these dinner parties, three of the four were problematic:

•  pate de foie gras is, rather obviously, not something I’m going to be able to MAKE on my own, is kind of hard to base an interesting dish around, and has the whole “animal cruelty” angle making it unpalatable.

• The second dish dinde desosse is problematic the OTHER direction: that line literally translates as “boneless turkey”, and my research suggests the only dropped word there is “breast”. Man, he’s so fancy, with his…sandwich meat.

• The third dish salad a la Volaille is at least complicated enough to BE a real recipe…but it’s also NOT a recipe for a very snowy February: It’s a cold salad of shredded chicken, lettuce, anchovy filets, a SHIT-TON of Mayonnaise (like, you are supposed to take all of the meat off of two chickens, and set it on/around a mound of lettuce, and then cover, like an icing, ALL of it in a layer of mayo, on which you drape the anchovies) and a weird mix of green, salty, pickled things (Capers, artichoke hearts, and green olives).

But the FOURTH recipe…That’s where things get interesting.

Long Live the Queen

So the 4th recipe the Ogle specifically shit-talks Van Buren as serving is soupe a la Reine, a variant name for potage a la Reine, and I warn you know, because we’re running late, I am completely skipping the proper diacritical marks unless I already know them. And looking up the recipe, it’s a PERFECT dish to work with, because it consists of making and mixing two stocks together to form the base of the soup, just like we’ve been splitting the difference with every other part of this process. AND, despite the French name, the current place you’re most likely to see a modern variant of “Queen’s Soup” is in The Netherlands where it’s called Koninginnesoep, because Dutch looks like a German speaker got hit in the head and is trying to write English.

This is but a PRELUDE of the nonsense.

 Now, basically, Soupe a la Reine covers a wide spectrum of dishes, because over the years, people chose not to try as hard: See, the original recipe involves making an Almond Stock, AND a chicken-mushroom stock, AND pounding some chicken or partridge meat into a paste, and basically making cream of chicken soup without any cream. The almond ‘stock’ makes it creamy, without the dairy. Then you garnish it with pistachios, pomegranate seeds, and cockscomb. And that is a LOT of work, and a lot of expensive ingredients, for, as I noted, “fancy cream of chicken soup”. Jacques Pepin in a more modern version has you poach chicken to make chicken stock, in which you boil mushrooms, carrots, celery, and leeks, and then thicken with a velouté, a French mother sauce of roux mixed with light broth (chicken, veal or fish, normally), and additional cream. Another recipe, derived from the style of soup served in the Netherlands for “Queen’s Day”, which is when the soup is most popular, are literally just “chicken stock, half-and-half, chicken, carrot and peas.” (People believe that the Carrot and Peas are people coming up with cheaper alternatives to pistachios and pomegranate seeds: if you’re making 1,000 servings, you REALLY want to cut costs where possible.)

So we, naturally, split the difference, given the theme of today’s post: we MADE an almond ‘stock’, then made the soup base described in Jacques’ recipe, combined the two, and then, just  to FURTHER confuse things, added cream. BUT the first thing we did was shred chicken!

Look how cleanly I shredded off that one wing! (I was half-way through shredding before I realized I bought a roast chicken with only one wing.)

This was actually one of the reasons we got delayed: I had intended to just BUY shredded chicken meat, but because of the snow, they were out, so I had to buy a whole chicken and shred it myself. (It also rolled while I was driving home, covering MULTIPLE bags, and a magazine, in chicken grease, because I assure you, EVERY STEP of the process of getting this together on Monday had SOMETHING go wrong.) And let me tell you, as someone who’s used to shredding chicken while it’s still hot: holy crap is it much harder when it’s cold. I do not recommend.

Once the chicken’s shredded, you gotta make Almond stock. The recipe for this relies on an interesting ingredient.

Sand: A gram a day keeps Anakin away!

That’s almond flour, which was the only form of “ground almond” I could locate in the store. You want 150 grams of it simmering in a pot with 3.5 cups of chicken stock, 2 tbsps of breadcrumbs, some lemon, and a bouquet garni, which I suspended over the pot via less-than normal means because I couldn’t find my kitchen twine.

I can’t quite pin down what’s unusual about this…

Minutes later, I remembered I have to strain this pot, so I just toss the herbs straight in. You just bring that to a boil, simmer for 20 minutes, and then drain. Which…turned into a mess, but first, let’s handle the other pot. You want to make a chicken mushroom stock, which I achieved via a very sophisticated means.

Soak it up, suckers.

Yep, just toss a couple mushrooms in a pot of chicken stock, and simmer for a while. To that, add some julienned leeks, carrots, and celery, and simmer all that together, then add some MORE mushrooms, and further simmer. Meanwhile, it’s time to start viciously burning yourself:

See, the recipes say to ‘strain out’ the almond stock, which at this point, is more of a paste, and is holding heat VERY well. My mother and I both attempted to arrange a cheese-cloth strainer in a way where we could squeeze out the liquid, resulting in burned fingers. I ended up having to spend the time shredding my chicken meat a second time while I waited for the paste to cool.

In retrospect, I think cheesecloth may have been TOO fine/absorbent, and that we should have worked the mixture through a fine mesh strainer, so that we’d still have a fair amount of almond-paste-thickening-power, while not having any large chunks, since I felt that the almond stock had an interesting sweetness, which I felt was slightly lost in the straining process. (In at least one (terrifying) version of the recipe, you’re supposed to work the CHICKEN through such a strainer, which was way too much work for me.)

It hopefully would have resulted in something that looked less like a hummus-based murder, at least .

Then, to your simmered broth of  vegetables, add the almond stock, shredded chicken, and, if you want to be doubly subversive, as I often am, some cream. I also topped mine with pistachios, because I was GOING to do pistachios and pomegranate seeds to harken back to the original recipe…and the store was OUT OF FUCKING POMEGRANTES.

Soup: it’s rarely visually appealing.

The result was universally praised by my family. The flavor is remarkably akin to a great Chicken Pot-Pie filling. It’s rich, the simmered julienned vegetables are VERY soft. There’s something kind of fun about the fact that the sliced mushrooms were the largest single pieces of food in the dish. If you can find a method to streamline the almond stock straining, I think it’s well worth the effort.

THURSDAY: DUE TO THE DELAY, AND SOME OTHER BEHIND-THE-SCENES ISSUES, WE’RE GOING TO SKIP A THURSDAY POST THIS WEEK.

MONDAY: THINGS GET HOT, HOT, HOT! MAYBE TOO HOT! MAYBE THE HOUSE CATCHES FIRE! WE DON’T KNOW YET, BUT WE’RE MAKING HOT POT HAPPEN.

RECIPE

Soupe a La Reine

Ingredients

                Almond Stock

3.5 cups chicken stock or bone broth

150 grams almond flour

2 tbsp plain breadcrumbs

1 tbsp lemon juice

1 bouquet garni (1 sprig sage, 2 sprigs thyme, and 1 sprig rosemary)

                Chicken-Mushroom Stock and Vegetables

4.5 cups of chicken stock or bone broth

8 ounces sliced mushrooms

1 leek, root end and end leaves cut off, washed and julienned

2 carrots, julienned

2 ribs of celery, julienned

Salt and pepper

                Finishing components

2 cups shredded chicken

1 cup cream

Pistachios and Pomegrante Seeds (for topping)

Preparation

1. Combine all ingredients for the almond stock in a medium saucepan, stirring to combine. Bring to a boil, and simmer 20 minutes, stirring frequently to prevent scorching. Strain to remove solids/herbs.

2. Combine the chicken stock and half the mushrooms in a large saucepan. Bring to boil, and simmer for 5 minutes. Add leek, simmer another 5 minutes. Add carrot and celery, simmer 3 minutes. Add the remaining mushrooms, and simmer another 5-10 minutes, until all vegetables are softened. Season to taste.

3. Add the strained almond stock, and the shredded chicken. Stir to combine, and return to a simmer. Taste for seasoning, and finish by adding cream and stirring to combine. Serve hot, topping with pistachios and pomegranate seeds.