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Beef, Roast, and Boiled Turkey Soup
Take the liquor in which a turkey has been boiled, and the bones of the turkey and beef; put them into a soup-pot with two or three carrots, turnips, and onions, half a dozen cloves, pepper, salt, and tomatoes if they can be had; boil four hours, then strain all out. Put the soup back into the pot, mix two table-spoonfuls of flour in a little cold water; stir it into the soup, and allow it to boil. Cut some bread in the form of dice, lay it in the bottom of the tureen, pour the soup on to it, and colour with a little soy.
A thrift soup built on the pot liquor from a boiled turkey and the bones of a roast joint — essentially a household stock recipe with a flour thickening and a bread garnish. A few points to make it behave.
- Start with the saltTurkey boiling liquor is often already salted, and it will concentrate over four hours. Taste before adding the salt called for, and hold most of it back until after straining and reducing.
- "Soy"In Victorian and Edwardian English cookery books soy means soy sauce, sold as a bottled colouring and seasoning for gravies. A teaspoon or two darkens the soup; more will make it taste of soy rather than turkey.
- Boil means simmerFour hours at a genuine rolling boil will emulsify the fat and cloud the stock. Hold it at a bare tremble, lid ajar, and skim the grey scum in the first twenty minutes.
- Degrease after strainingThe recipe does not mention it, but turkey liquor plus roast beef bones yields a great deal of fat. Chill the strained stock and lift the solid cap, or blot it with paper while hot — otherwise the flour thickening traps the fat in suspension.
- The flour needs real boilingTwo tablespoons of flour slaked in cold water will give only a light body, and the recipe never says how much liquor you are thickening, so judge by eye. Stir it in off the boil, then bring the whole back up and keep it bubbling two or three minutes; a slurry that only warms through tastes raw and pasty.
- Vegetables and clovesTwo or three each of carrots, turnips and onions suits a large pot. Six cloves is assertive; tie them with the peppercorns in a scrap of muslin so they can come out early if the stock starts to taste medicinal.
- The bread diceRaw bread cubes in the bottom of the tureen will soften quickly and swell into the soup. Dry or fry them first if you want them to hold, and put them in only as the soup goes to table.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities of liquor, so the yield depends entirely on how much came off the bird; expect a large pot rather than a small one.
This entry belongs to the great Victorian economy of the second-day dinner. A boiled turkey — poached whole in water rather than roasted, a common English treatment for a large bird through the nineteenth century — left behind gallons of good liquor that no careful cook would pour away, and the carcass and the beef bones from a separate roast went in with it. The method matters more than the ingredients: a flavoured liquor, long extraction from bones, a strain, a flour thickening, a colouring. The bottled soy is the period's tell. Soy sauce had reached Britain through East India trade by the late seventeenth century and was well established in the eighteenth, absorbed into English cookery not so much as a seasoning in its own right as a browning agent for soups and gravies, sitting on the store shelf beside mushroom ketchup and Harvey's sauce. The bread dice in the tureen are older still, generally understood as a survival of the medieval sop, the piece of bread that broth was poured over rather than served beside.