Swiss Soup
Five gallons water, six potatoes and three turnips sliced; boil five hours until perfectly dissolved and the consistency of pea soup, filling up as it boils away; add butter size of an egg, season with salt and pepper, and serve. A small piece salt pork, a bone or bit of veal or lamb, and an onion, may be added to vary this soup.
A thin, almost monastic vegetable pottage scaled for a farm household or a boarding table. The proportions only make sense if you read the boiling-down instruction as the whole method.
- Scale it down firstFive gallons of water to six potatoes and three turnips is an institutional batch. For a household pot, use 2 potatoes, 1 turnip and about 2 quarts of water, bearing in mind this is a much thicker vegetable-to-water ratio than the original; expect roughly 1 quart of finished soup after long reduction.
- The hinge is reduction, not thickenerThere is no flour or cream here. Body comes entirely from starch released as the potatoes disintegrate and from water boiled away, so keep the pot at a steady simmer with the lid off or ajar. "Filling up as it boils away" is ambiguous: read against the call for pea-soup consistency, it probably means topping up only enough to keep the vegetables covered rather than maintaining the original volume.
- Five hours is not a misprint, but it is not necessaryOn a wood range with uneven heat, a very long boil would have been the surest way to get the vegetables to collapse. On a modern burner, 60 to 90 minutes will usually dissolve them; a quick pass with a stick blender or a potato masher finishes the job.
- Butter size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Add it off the heat at the end so it emulsifies into the starch rather than sitting on top as slicks.
- Turnips vary"Turnip" in nineteenth-century American cookbooks usually means the white turnip; rutabaga was generally distinguished as Swedish turnip. Older or larger roots can turn sulfurous and bitter over a long boil, so use small, firm turnips, and peel them generously.
- The optional additions do the real seasoning workSalt pork, an onion and a veal or lamb bone are listed as variations, but without at least one of them this is potato water. Add the bone and pork at the start, the onion sliced with the vegetables, and salt only near the end once the pork has given up its own.
- Yield and servingThe household-scale version above gives four servings. It wants something crisp against it: toasted bread, croutons fried in the pork fat, or a spoon of grated hard cheese.
The name may say less about Switzerland than about the habit, often noted of American cookbooks of the 1870s and 80s, of labelling a plain, long-simmered peasant vegetable soup with a European tag to give it standing on a menu. Buckeye Cookery was assembled from contributions by Midwestern housewives, and its soup chapter is full of these five-gallon recipes: quantities suited to threshing crews, church suppers and households that kept a stockpot at the back of the range all day. The technique of dissolving root vegetables into their own cooking water, then enriching the result with butter and whatever salt meat was in the cellar, is far older than any national label, and is often said to belong to the everyday pottages of northern Europe, where a bone and an onion were the flavoring a cook could count on having.