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Vegetable Soup
1/2 cup carrot. 1½ quarts beef broth. 1/2 cup turnip. 1/3 cup butter. 1/2 cup celery. 1/2 tablespoon finely chopped parsley. 2 cups potato. 1½ teaspoons salt. 1/8 teaspoon pepper. 1/3 cup onion.
PROCESS: Wash and scrape carrot, cut in tiny cubes; wash and pare turnip, cut same as carrot; wash, scrape and cut celery in thin slices; wash, pare and cut potatoes in one-fourth inch cubes; peel and cut onion in thin slices, mix vegetables, except potatoes, and cook ten minutes in butter, stirring constantly. Add potatoes, cover and cook three or four minutes, add beef broth which was previously strained and all fat removed. Cover and simmer one hour. Put parsley, salt and pepper in bottom of soup tureen and turn in hot soup.
A straightforward vegetable soup built on strained beef broth, with the vegetables sweated in butter first rather than boiled — the step that gives it more flavour than its plain ingredient list suggests. The printed list has been damaged in transmission, so read it alongside the method.
- The broken measurementsThe list opens "1/2 quarts beef broth," which looks like a lost leading numeral; 1½ quarts (6 cups) or 2½ quarts (10 cups) are both plausible readings, and neither can be settled from the page. Carrot is prepared in the method — "wash and scrape carrot, cut in tiny cubes" — but has dropped out of the ingredient list entirely; about ½ cup diced, to match the turnip, keeps the proportions balanced.
- Strain and defat the brothThe instruction to strain the broth and remove all fat is not fussiness. With no thickener and no cream, any fat floats in visible beads on the surface of the finished soup. Chill the broth and lift the solid cap off, or blot the surface with paper towel.
- Sweating, not browningTen minutes in butter with constant stirring means softening the vegetables without colour. Keep the heat at medium-low; browned onion and carrot will push the soup toward a darker, roastier flavour than intended here.
- Cut sizes matterQuarter-inch potato cubes and "tiny cubes" of carrot and turnip are specified so everything finishes together over the hour's simmer. Larger pieces of turnip in particular stay woody.
- The hour of simmeringA full hour past the point where the potatoes are tender will break them down and cloud the broth. If you want distinct cubes and a clear liquid, 25 to 30 minutes at a bare simmer is enough.
- Herbs and seasoning at the endPutting the parsley, salt and pepper in the bottom of the tureen and pouring the hot soup over them keeps the parsley green and lets the pepper stay aromatic. Taste after it has stood a minute; 1½ teaspoons of salt assumes an unsalted homemade broth, and commercial stock will need far less.
- YieldDepends on how the damaged broth measurement is read: roughly 1½ to 2½ quarts, serving four to eight as a first course.
Vegetable soup of this kind was an economical dish, a way of using strained broth left from a boiled or braised joint, stretched with root vegetables. Turnip, carrot, celery, onion and potato are all keeping vegetables of late autumn. Cooking the vegetables in butter before adding liquid — what a French kitchen would call sweating — was among the techniques promoted by the domestic-science cookery schools of the period.