[Sca-cooks] Egg and lemon soups, question

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Christiane:
>The soup tastes great although it is really more a stew; a little 
>too much rice, but easily fixed next time. A few egg-white strands 
>showed up when I stirred in the egg/lemon mixture, and I was 
>wondering how that can be prevented. Should I only have been using 
>the yolks instead of whole eggs?

I believe the standard Greek avgolemno uses whole eggs, and there's a 
certain amount of curdling to be expected. Classically French-trained 
cooks making what they think is avgolemno ;-) might try to  prevent 
this by using only yolks, and by gradually adding some of the soup to 
the beaten yolks (or beaten whole eggs) until the majority of the 
soup and egg mixture is in the mixing bowl where you beat the eggs, 
_then_ returning it all to the pot. It's called a liaison, which is 
just a fancy term for a certain type of gradual thickening used to 
prevent eggs or cream from curdling by raising their temperature very 
slowly. The mixing of the hot stuff into the cool stuff a little at a 
time is called tempering.

Of course, I doubt they do any of this in Greece (probably relying on 
the thickening power of the rice to stabilize the whole thing), but 
it does work.

>And also, is this style of soup (lamb or chicken-broth based, egg 
>and lemon) in period for Greece or the Meditteranean?

Oddly enough (first off, I'll say I have no idea if this is period 
for the Mediterranean), there's a recipe in Elinor Fettiplace's 
receipt book (c. 1600 CE) for boiled leg of mutton in a lemon sauce 
made with lemon juice, sliced lemons, the broth from the mutton, and 
a thickening of egg yolks...

Adamantius
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