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Hotch Potch
1/3 cup pearl barley, 1 small cabbage, 2 carrots, 1 turnip, 2 onions, parsley and herbs, 4 tablespoons Crisco, salt and pepper to taste, and 3 quarts water. Put barley on fire with cold water. Scrape or grate one of carrots, and put it aside in little water. Chop all rest of vegetables very small, and when water boils put them in with Crisco, salt and pepper. There should be enough vegetables to make it rather thick. Boil for 2 hours, then add scraped carrots, and boil for another 1/2 hour. Many other vegetables may be added. Lettuce, green peas, and celery when in season.
A vegetable hotch potch built on barley and long boiling, from a shortening-company cookbook that put Crisco where an older recipe would have used mutton fat or a bone. It works, but the timings belong to a coal range that needed hours to do anything.
- The hinge: two-stage carrotThe grated carrot held back and added at the end is the whole point of the dish — it goes in for the last half hour to give sweetness and colour that two hours of boiling would destroy. Do not consolidate it with the rest of the vegetables.
- Cut the cooking timePearl barley is tender in 40-50 minutes and chopped cabbage, turnip and onion in 20-30. Two and a half hours total gives grey mush; start the barley, add the vegetables after about 25 minutes, simmer 30 more, then the grated carrot for a final 15.
- CriscoIntroduced in 1911 and still sold, though reformulated to remove partially hydrogenated oil. Four tablespoons of any neutral fat, butter or olive oil does the same job; sweating the onions in it first adds flavour the original never gets.
- "Parsley and herbs"Unspecified, as was normal. A Scottish hotch potch would lean on parsley, thyme and a bay leaf; the parsley is best chopped in at the end rather than boiled from the start.
- Water and thicknessThree quarts is a large potful — about 3 litres, feeding eight to ten as a first course. The instruction that there be "enough vegetables to make it rather thick" is the real measure: the finished soup should hold the spoon, not run off it.
- SaltWith no stock and no meat, this needs considerably more salt than the recipe implies. Season at the start, then again after the barley has swelled and absorbed liquid.
- The seasonal additionsLettuce, peas and celery all want to go in near the end with the grated carrot. Peas boiled for two hours are the reason older vegetable soups had such a reputation.
Hotch potch is the Scottish version of a name that runs through English cookery as hotchpot and hodgepodge, all of them from Old French hochepot, a pot whose contents are shaken or jumbled together; the same root gives the legal term for pooling an estate. In Scotland it usually meant a summer soup of the year's first vegetables built on a neck of lamb or mutton — sometimes called hairst bree, harvest broth — with peas and young carrots as the signature. This version drops the meat entirely and puts Crisco in its place, which tells you exactly what kind of book it is: a Procter & Gamble promotional cookbook in which recipe after recipe calls for the company's new hydrogenated shortening.