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To Make Soup from Stock
Put on as much stock as required; remove all sediment; add water, vegetables and seasoning to suit the taste. Prepare the vegetables, cutting them fine, boil until well done, then strain through a sieve and serve at once.
In making white soups nothing but white vegetables should be used. For thickening use pearl barley, macaroni, rice, etc. For flavoring soups, use bay leaves, thyme, celery, parsley, sweet marjoram, mint, sage, onions, cloves, and mace. As to seasoning soup, no particular rule can be given, as the soup-maker must be a good taster, and exercise judgment. Catsups and sauces are a great addition to soups. Spicing should always be used sparingly.
This is a method rather than a formula: a framework for turning yesterday's stock into today's soup. The judgment it asks for is real, but a few of its assumptions need translating.
- Removing the sedimentChilled stock separates into a clear body, a fat cap on top, and a cloudy layer of sediment at the bottom. Lift the fat off in a disc, ladle the clear stock away, and discard the last half inch rather than tipping the pot and stirring it back in.
- The hinge: taste before you add saltReduced stock concentrates salt, so season only after the vegetables are cooked and the volume has settled. The instruction that the cook "must be a good taster" is the whole recipe, and it means tasting at the end, not the beginning.
- White soupsThe white vegetables meant here are onion, leek whites, celery, parsnip, turnip, cauliflower and potato. Carrot, tomato and any green will tint the soup, which mattered when a pale soup was offered alongside a brown one as the alternative choice at the soup course.
- Thickenings need their own timePearl barley takes 40-50 minutes, brown rice about the same, white rice 15-20, small dried pasta 8-10. Cook them in the soup only if you want the starch to thicken it; cook them separately and add at the end if you want clear broth with grains in it.
- Straining is optional nowThe direction to press everything through a sieve reflects a period preference for smooth soups. A blender will puree the vegetables in seconds, though it will not hold back fibre and skins the way a sieve does, and leaving the vegetables in cubes is acceptable to modern taste.
- Herbs, in real quantitiesFor about two quarts of stock: one or two bay leaves, a few sprigs of thyme or parsley, a teaspoon of chopped marjoram. Mace and cloves want a pinch and no more, and both should go in whole and be fished out. The warning about sparing spice is sound advice, not timidity.
- "Catsups and sauces"In this period the term covered mushroom or walnut ketchup, Worcestershire, or a bottled anchovy sauce, all of them dark, salty and savoury. Modern tomato ketchup is far sweeter and is not a substitute; a splash of Worcestershire or soy comes much closer to the intended effect.
- YieldTwo quarts of stock with a pound of vegetables gives six to eight first-course servings, or four as a main with bread.
- Stock keepingRefrigerated stock is good for three or four days and freezes for months. Cool it quickly in a shallow pan rather than leaving the pot on the stove overnight.
Soup from stock was the quiet economy at the centre of a nineteenth-century kitchen: bones and trimmings went into the stockpot, the pot yielded a broth that could become half a dozen different soups, and nothing was bought specially. The distinction between white and brown soups that this entry takes for granted came from French service, where a formal dinner offered a choice of two soups and their contrast in colour was part of the point — hence the insistence that a white soup admit only pale vegetables. The list of flavourings is a fair inventory of what an American kitchen garden and spice drawer held, and the refusal to give proportions is characteristic of the era's household books, which assumed a cook who had learned by tasting rather than by measuring.