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Turnip Soup
Take 2 pounds of peeled turnips, cut into small squares, place in a stewpan with 4 tablespoons Crisco, stir them over a quick fire, add pinch salt, 1 tablespoon flour, add 3 pints of stock, simmer gently for 1 1/2 hours, and pass whole through a sieve. Put back in stewpan, and add little seasoning. Bring to boil, and just before sending to table add 1 cup of good cream.
A plain white vegetable soup of the pre-blender era, written for a cook with a hair sieve and no clock anxiety. Two things want attention: the cooking time and the cream.
- CriscoThe book is a Crisco promotional volume, so the shortening appears where an English cook would have written butter. Four tablespoons of butter, or a neutral oil, does the same job and tastes better in a cream soup.
- Quick fireMedium-high heat. The point is to sweat the turnip in fat and drive off some of its raw sulphurous edge before the stock goes in, without browning it — a browned turnip will grey the finished soup.
- Stock quantityThree pints is 6 cups. A light chicken or veal stock suits it; the recipe does not specify, but a strong beef stock will bury the turnip.
- The 1 1/2 hoursFar longer than needed. Diced turnip is fully soft in 25 to 30 minutes; the long simmer may simply reflect an unregulated range and the need to get the vegetable soft enough to force through a sieve by hand. Cook until a piece crushes against the side of the pan.
- Pass whole through a sieveMeaning purée everything, solids and liquid together, rather than straining the broth off. A blender or food mill replaces the sieve; a stick blender in the pan is quickest, though a jug blender gives a smoother result.
- Adding the creamBring the puree to a boil, then take it off the heat before the cup of cream goes in. Boiling after the cream is added risks separation, and 'just before sending to table' keeps it hot without cooking it further.
- Little seasoningSalt and white pepper, with a grating of nutmeg if you like it. Turnip needs more salt than most vegetables to stop tasting flat, so taste after the cream, which mutes it.
- YieldRoughly seven to eight cups of finished soup, depending on how far it reduces, serving six or so as a first course.
This belongs to the family of plain purée soups that English and American cookery books turned out by the dozen — a root vegetable sweated in fat, thickened with a spoon of flour, extended with stock, sieved, and finished with cream. The type is generally traced to the French potage purée tradition as it was absorbed into nineteenth-century English kitchens, where the sieve did the work a blender does now and the long simmer existed mainly to make that sieving possible. Turnip was a cheap, storable winter root, kept in cellars and clamps well into spring, which is why it appears so often in calendar-arranged menu books like this one: it was what a household actually had in February. The Crisco in the ingredient list places the page somewhere after the shortening's introduction in 1911, among the promotional cookbooks in which familiar recipes were reprinted with the new fat quietly substituted for butter or lard.