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Vegetable Soup (Three onions three carrots)
Three onions, three carrots, three turnips, one small cabbage, one pint tomatoes; chop all the vegetables except the tomatoes very fine, have ready in a porcelain kettle three quarts boiling water, put in all except cabbage and tomatoes and simmer for half an hour, then add the chopped cabbage and tomatoes (the tomatoes previously stewed), also a bunch of sweet herbs. Let soup boil for twenty minutes, strain through sieve, rubbing all the vegetables through. Take two table-spoons of best butter and one of flour and beat to a cream. Now pepper and salt soup to taste, and add a tea-spoon of white sugar, a half cup of sweet cream if you have it, and last stir in the butter and flour; let it boil up and it is ready for the table. Serve with fried bread-chips, or poached eggs one in each dish. - Mrs. H. H. Herbert, Benson, Minn.
A straightforward purée soup from a Midwestern contributor, built on root vegetables and finished with a butter-and-flour paste. A few of its terms and one point of technique need translating.
- Porcelain kettleThis means an enamelled cast-iron or enamel-on-steel pot, specified so the acid in the tomatoes would not react with bare iron or copper. Any non-reactive pot — enamelled, stainless, or a Dutch oven — does the same job.
- The finish is the hingeThe butter and flour creamed together is a beurre manié, whisked in at the very end. It must come to a full boil for a minute or two after it goes in, or the soup tastes of raw flour. Add it in small lumps while whisking so it disperses rather than settling in clots.
- StrainingRubbing everything through a sieve was the usual way to a smooth purée in a nineteenth-century kitchen. A food mill gives the same texture with a fraction of the labour; an immersion blender is faster still, though it leaves cabbage and tomato skins in suspension rather than removing them.
- Sweet herbsA period bouquet garni — parsley, thyme, marjoram or savory, and a bay leaf, tied with string so it can be pulled out before straining. "Sweet" here means fragrant rather than sugary.
- Sweet creamCream that has not soured, i.e. ordinary heavy or whipping cream. Half a cup in three quarts is a light enrichment; stir it in off a hard boil to keep it from breaking against the tomato acid.
- TomatoesA pint is two cups. Home-canned tomatoes were the winter default; a 14-15 oz can substitutes closely, and the instruction to stew them first can be skipped for canned since they are already cooked.
- Bread-chipsBread cut in small pieces and fried in butter or drippings — croutons. Fry them until dry through, not just coloured, or they go soft in the bowl.
- Yield and seasoningThree quarts of water plus vegetables gives roughly eight servings. The recipe salts only at the end, which is correct here: the soup reduces during the two boiling stages, and salting early overshoots.
Buckeye Cookery (1877), compiled in Ohio, collected recipes from contributors across the settled Midwest, and the credit to Mrs. H. H. Herbert of Benson, Minnesota is typical of how the book was assembled — a network of correspondents rather than a single author. The soup itself is a purée of cellar vegetables: onions, carrots, turnips and cabbage all keep for months in a root cellar or clamp, which is why they appear together in nineteenth-century American winter cookery so often. The pint of tomatoes may point to home-put-up fruit, though in season it could as easily have been fresh. Finishing a strained vegetable soup with butter, flour and cream follows French practice for a purée soup, filtered through the English and American household manuals that circulated alongside books like this one. The suggestion to float a poached egg in each dish is an older economy — a way to turn a meatless soup into a meal.