Julienne Soup
Into a kettle put one good spoonful of butter; stir while melting. Fry a light brown three small onions. Add three quarts of rich stock, three chopped carrots, two small chopped turnips, three gills of dried peas that have been soaked nine or ten hours. Add salt, pepper, little mace and celery seed. Boil for two hours.
A stock-based vegetable soup that leans on dried peas for body. The measurements are period shorthand, and the two-hour boil needs rethinking if you want the vegetables to survive.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so three gills of dried peas is about 1½ cups, roughly 10 oz dry. They will roughly double in volume after soaking.
- "One good spoonful of butter"Read this as a generous tablespoon, roughly ½ to 1 oz. It is there to brown the onions, not to enrich the soup.
- Simmer, do not boilTwo hours at a rolling boil will reduce three quarts hard and cloud the stock. Bring it up, then hold it at a bare simmer; the peas need the time, and they are the reason for it.
- Add the root vegetables lateCarrots and turnips cut small turn to pulp long before the peas are tender. Cook the peas in the stock for 60-75 minutes, then add the carrot and turnip for the last 20-25 minutes.
- About the nameJulienne properly means vegetables cut in fine matchsticks, about 1/8 inch square and an inch or two long. The recipe only says "chopped," but cutting them julienne is what earns the title and holds shape better than a rough dice.
- Mace and celery seedNo quantities are given and both are assertive. Start with a pinch of ground mace and 1/4 teaspoon celery seed for three quarts, and taste before adding more.
- Stock"Rich stock" here means a gelatinous homemade beef or veal stock. Commercial cartons are thinner and much saltier, so hold back the salt until the end.
- YieldThree quarts of stock plus vegetables gives about 10 to 12 servings as a first course. It thickens noticeably overnight as the peas break down; thin with stock when reheating.
Julienne soup was a fixture of American and English cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century onward, taken directly from French practice, where julienne describes the knife cut rather than any particular set of vegetables. The word is generally traced to eighteenth-century French kitchens, though whose name it commemorates has never been settled. In household books of this period the dish plausibly did double duty: it was elegant enough to open a dinner, and a clear stock threaded with neat strips of carrot and turnip may well have been read as a visible demonstration of a cook's knife skills, while it was also thrifty, using the stockpot that a well-run kitchen kept going anyway. The dried peas in this version are a domestic departure from the classic clear julienne, which is left thin and transparent. Their addition tells you this soup was meant to fill people up as much as impress them.