Stanley Soup
Make a rich stock of lamb, and season well with pepper, salt and a lump of butter. To this add green peas, corn, and okra in equal quantities, also a little rice. Cook until vegetables seem tender, and then thicken with a little flour. Serve with sauce, and do not strain. This is a very delicate, nice soup.
A vague but workable formula: a lamb broth carrying peas, corn, okra and rice. The original gives no quantities at all, so treat the proportions as the cook's business and the sequence as the recipe's real instruction.
- Building the stockLamb neck, shanks or breast bones roasted then simmered 3-4 hours give the "rich stock" intended here. Skim the fat before the vegetables go in, or the added butter will make it greasy.
- Working quantitiesFor about 2 quarts of stock, roughly 1 cup each of peas, corn and sliced okra with 1/3 cup long-grain rice keeps the soup a soup rather than a stew. That yields six to eight servings.
- Okra is the hingeSliced okra releases mucilage the longer it cooks, and since the soup is not strained that body stays in the bowl along with the vegetables. Add it in the last 10-12 minutes; boiled hard for half an hour it turns to slime and grey threads.
- Stagger the vegetablesThe original cooks everything until "tender," which may have suited whatever peas and corn were to hand. Frozen peas and corn need 4-5 minutes; give the rice its full 15-18 minutes first, then the okra, then the peas and corn.
- Thickening with flourDo not shake dry flour into hot soup. Mix 2 tablespoons flour with an equal weight of soft butter and whisk the paste in a piece at a time, then simmer three or four minutes to lose the raw taste. Between the rice and the okra the soup may need no flour at all.
- "Serve with sauce"Genuinely ambiguous in the original. In a book of this vintage it most likely means a bottled table sauce - Worcestershire, mushroom catsup or a pepper sauce - passed separately rather than a made sauce. A cruet of vinegar-based hot sauce suits the okra.
- Butter and seasoningThe "lump of butter" is perhaps 1 to 2 tablespoons. Salt the stock lightly during the long simmer and correct at the end, since reduction concentrates it.
Soups titled after people were a fixture of American cookbooks, and "Stanley" here is more likely a household or hotel name than a documented figure. What is telling is the vegetable list. Peas, corn and okra in equal parts, thickened by rice and served unstrained, places the recipe in the American South or in Southern-influenced kitchens, where okra had been grown since the eighteenth century and was valued precisely for the body it gives a broth - the same property that makes gumbo work. Lamb rather than beef or chicken stock is the less usual choice, and the recipe describes the result as "a very delicate, nice soup."