| Jenny Lind's soup | |
| Type: | Soup |
| Main Ingredient: | Rutabaga, chicken stock, roux, Gruyère cheese, sago, egg yolks, heavy cream, egg whites |
| No Recipes: | true |
Jenny Lind's soup is a soup named for popular 19th-century singer Jenny Lind.[1] She is supposed to have used this soup to soothe her chest and found it to be beneficial to her voice before performances.[2]
The dish is made from mashed rutabaga or sago,[1] chicken stock thickened with a roux, Gruyère cheese, sage, egg yolks,[1] and heavy cream,[1] and topped with beaten egg whites. (This topping, unfamiliar to many, is a common tradition in French cuisine de famille, as it uses up the whites left over from using the yolks as a thickener).
The soup is mentioned in Isabella Beeton's Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861) which draws on Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families (1847); Acton based her description on Mary Howitt, translator of Swedish writer Fredrika Bremer.[3]
The soup was the hook for a joke in many British and Irish newspapers, including the Western Daily Mercury, for more than sixty years: "“Why would Jenny Lind make good soup?" – "Because she's neither Alboni (all bony) nor Grisi (greasy)".
Leopold Bloom, a character in James Joyce's Ulysses, fantasizes about it while lunching in the Ormond Hotel: "Jenny Lind soup: stock, sage, raw eggs, half-pint of cream. For creamy dreamy."