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Vegetable Soup (After boiling a soup bone)
After boiling a soup bone or piece of beef until done, add to the broth boiling water to make the amount of soup wanted, and when boiling again add a large handful of cabbage cut fine as for slaw, a half pint of tomatoes, canned or fresh; peel and slice and add three large or four small onions, and two or three potatoes (some use a half tea-cup of dried or half pint of green corn; if dried corn is used, it should be soaked). Let boil from half to three-quarters of an hour; if you like a little thickening, stir an egg or yolk with a large spoonful of milk and a tea-spoon of flour, put in five or ten minutes before taking off; this makes it very rich. Serve with crackers. -Mrs. H. C. Vosbury.
A frugal second-day soup built on the broth left from boiling beef, with whatever vegetables the garden or pantry offered. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- Start with the boneThe recipe presumes you have already simmered a marrow or shank bone, or a piece of boiling beef, for two to three hours and have the broth and the meat. If starting fresh, count on about 3 hours of gentle simmering before you reach the first line of the recipe, and skim the fat once the broth has chilled.
- Quantities are by eyeNo volume of broth is given — "the amount of soup wanted" — so scale to the pot. For roughly 3 quarts of finished soup, the listed vegetables are about right and will serve six to eight.
- Half a pint of tomatoesA pint here is 16 fl oz, so half a pint is one cup — a little more than half a standard 14.5 oz can, drained juices included. Home-canned tomatoes of the period were generally put up in their own liquid without seasoning, so use whole or diced tomatoes with no added basil or citric-acid brightness.
- Dried cornDried sweet corn is not hominy or popcorn; it is sweet corn cut from the cob and kiln- or oven-dried, still sold by Pennsylvania Dutch grocers. Soak it at least 2 hours, or overnight, before it goes in. Half a teacup is roughly 1/3 cup dried, which swells considerably. Frozen corn stands in for the "green" corn.
- The cabbage timingCabbage cut slaw-fine will be soft in 20 minutes and sulphurous by 45. If you want it to keep any texture, hold it back and add it for the last 20 minutes rather than at the start of the full three-quarters of an hour.
- The egg thickeningThis is a liaison, and the hinge of the dish. Beat the egg or yolk with the milk and flour, then temper it with a ladle of hot broth before it goes into the pot, and keep the soup below a boil afterward. Dropped straight into boiling liquid it curdles into shreds.
- Season itNo salt or pepper is listed, an omission common enough in recipes of this kind. Taste and correct at the end; unsalted homemade broth will need a good deal.
- Serve with crackersMost likely plain hard water crackers or common crackers rather than a salt-topped cracker. Oyster crackers are the nearest supermarket equivalent.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877, out of Minneapolis but rooted in Ohio church-supper cooking) is organized around thrift, and this soup is a clear case: it begins where another meal ended. The boiling piece of beef or the soup bone was the week's cheap protein, and the broth it left behind was too valuable to discard, so a handful of cabbage, a few onions and potatoes, and a jar of the previous summer's tomatoes turned it into a second dinner. The corn given as either dried or "green" marks the seasonal split of a pre-freezer household — sweet corn dried on racks in late summer, reconstituted all winter. The egg-and-milk liaison at the end is an old European technique that survived in American farm kitchens long after restaurant cooking moved to roux and cream; the book notes it "makes it very rich," which in 1877 was praise. Recipes signed with a contributor's name, as this one is, came from the local women who supplied the compilers with their receipts.