Carrot Soup
Put in soup-kettle a knuckle of veal, three or four quarts cold water, a quart finely-sliced carrots, one head celery; boil two and a half hours, add a handful rice, and boil an hour longer; season with pepper (or a bit of red pepper pod) and salt, and serve.
A plain long-simmered veal broth thickened with rice, not the smooth purée the name suggests today. Nothing here is difficult; the vagueness is all in the quantities.
- Knuckle of vealA veal shank, joint end included, roughly 2 to 3 lb. Ask the butcher for a cut-across shank or two so the marrow and gelatine can escape; that gelatine is the entire body of the soup, since there is no roux, cream or stock cube behind it.
- A quart of sliced carrotsAbout 1 to 1 1/4 lb of carrots. Slice thin as directed — they are meant to collapse into the broth rather than stay in rounds.
- One head celeryA whole bunch in modern terms, not a single rib. Leaves and coarse outer stalks included; trim the toughest strings if yours are heavy.
- A handful riceRead it as 1/3 to 1/2 cup of long-grain white rice. Any more and the finished soup sets to porridge overnight.
- The hour of riceRice boiled a full hour disintegrates completely, which appears to be the point — it is what thickens the soup. If you want grains that hold their shape, add the rice in the last 20 minutes instead, and expect a thinner soup.
- Keep it below a boilThe instruction says boil, but a hard boil for two and a half hours emulsifies the veal fat into the broth and clouds it. Hold it at a bare simmer and skim the grey foam in the first fifteen minutes.
- Season at the end, as writtenSalting a pot that simmers down over three and a half hours is how you overshoot. The red pepper pod is a whole dried chile — remove it once the heat is where you want it.
- Finishing and yieldLift out the shank, pick the meat from the bone and return it; the recipe does not say so. Three to four quarts of water gives roughly 2 to 2 1/2 quarts finished soup, six to eight servings. Chilling overnight lets you lift the fat cap off in one piece.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) came out of Ohio church-society circles, compiled from contributed household receipts, and its soup chapter reflects a kitchen where a cheap bony cut plus water plus whatever root vegetables were in the cellar was the daily arithmetic. A veal knuckle was among the least expensive things at a butcher's block precisely because it is mostly bone and connective tissue — worthless as a roast, ideal for gelatine. Carrot soups in the French tradition of the period, such as potage Crécy, were sieved to a purée; this one is not, and the difference marks the gap between the professional kitchen with its sieves and tammy cloths and the American farm kitchen thickening a pot with a handful of rice. Rice as a soup thickener runs through nineteenth-century American cookbooks generally, being cheap and shelf-stable.