Home › Food for the Sick › VEGETABLE SOUP
VEGETABLE SOUP
Two tomatoes, two potatoes, two onions, and one tablespoon rice; boil the whole in one quart of water for one hour, season with salt, dip dry toast in this till quite soft, and eat; this may be used when animal food is not allowed.
An invalid-cookery soup with no chopping instructions, no fat and no aromatics beyond the onion. It works, but it needs a little help to be worth eating outside a sickroom.
- QuantitiesTwo medium tomatoes, two medium potatoes and two medium onions in one quart (4 cups) of water gives a thin, brothy soup for two. Peel and dice everything to roughly half an inch so it cooks evenly in the hour given.
- The riceOne tablespoon of long-grain white rice is a very small amount: over a full hour it will break down almost completely and lend a little body rather than bulking out the bowl. Short-grain or arborio will break down faster and thicken more.
- An hour is longBy modern standards the vegetables are cooked to collapse. That is deliberate here — the soup was meant to be soft and easily digested — but 25 to 30 minutes gives a better-tasting soup if you are not feeding an invalid.
- SeasoningSalt is the only seasoning specified, in keeping with bland sickroom cookery. The soup takes well to black pepper, a bay leaf, or a spoonful of butter stirred in at the end if the diet allows it.
- Dry toast"Dry toast" means toast made without butter. Soaking it in the hot soup until soft was a common way of feeding someone with little appetite or difficulty chewing; here the toast is dipped and eaten rather than serving as a thickener.
- YieldRoughly three to four cups of finished soup, or two modest servings — one generous one if it is standing in for a meal.
Buckeye Cookery includes a section on cooking for the sick, and this recipe belongs to a nineteenth-century convalescent regime built around the idea that illness and "animal food" — meat, and often eggs and rich broths — did not agree. Beef tea and mutton broth were the standard invalid foods, so a soup explicitly offered for the days when meat was forbidden filled a real gap in the domestic nurse's repertoire. The instruction to soak dry toast in the broth points to the same tradition that produced milk toast and water panada: soft, warm, barely seasoned dishes that could be got down by someone with no appetite.