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CARROT SOUP (maigre)
Take two large onions, with eight large carrots (which have been washed and scraped, the red part cut into thin slices and the yellow part left out), one turnip, two heads of celery, or one tea-spoonful of celery-seed, and six ounces of the crumb of bread. Put three quarts of water into a saucepan, with a piece of soda the size of a pea. Let this boil; then put in the above ingredients, with a little cayenne pepper, salt, and mace. When they are soft, take out the vegetables and rub them through a coarse sieve; replace them, and add to the soup, when boiling, a large breakfast-cupful of cream or new milk. The soup should be as thick as cream. Time, two and a half hours. Probable cost, 1 1/2d. per pint. Sufficient for six persons.
A meatless (maigre) vegetable purée thickened with bread rather than roux. Most of the adjustments are about ingredients that have changed since the book was written, and a cooking time that no longer applies.
- "Maigre" means meatlessThe word marks this as a soup for fast days, made on water rather than meat stock. Nothing else in the method depends on it, though a light vegetable stock in place of the water improves the result considerably.
- The yellow coreOlder carrot varieties were often coarser, with a pale centre that could be woody, which is likely why the recipe has the yellow part cut away and left out. Modern carrots rarely have a core worth removing; use the whole root, allowing roughly 1.5 lb.
- The piece of sodaA pea-sized lump of soda (most likely bicarbonate, though period recipes sometimes meant washing soda) in three quarts of water was added to soften the vegetables faster and brighten their colour. Alkali also destroys vitamin C, can leave the carrots slightly slippery, and can give a soapy note. Leave it out.
- Bread crumb as thickenerSix ounces means the soft interior of a loaf, weighed without crust, not dried breadcrumbs. It dissolves during simmering and does the work a roux or potato would do now; stale white bread works best.
- Breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup is roughly 10 fl oz, or about 1 1/4 US cups. "New milk" is simply fresh whole milk. Add it off the boil and reheat gently — a hard boil after the cream goes in can curdle it.
- Two heads of celeryA Victorian "head" is what a greengrocer now sells as a whole bunch, so two is a great deal. One bunch, or the teaspoon of celery seed the recipe offers as an alternative, is enough.
- The timeTwo and a half hours is a legacy of coal ranges and slow-coming boils. Sliced carrot, onion and turnip are soft in 30 to 40 minutes; longer simply flattens the flavour.
- SievingThe coarse sieve is a blender or stick blender now. Pass the pur hinspaceee through a fine sieve afterwards if you want the cream-smooth texture the recipe describes.
- SeasoningMace is the lacy outer covering of nutmeg, warmer and less sweet; a good pinch of ground mace is the right dose for this quantity. Salt properly at the end, since a soup built on water needs more than one built on stock.
Maigre cookery — food permitted on the fast days of the Church calendar, made without meat or meat broth — kept a whole class of vegetable soups alive in English and French kitchens well into the nineteenth century. Cassell's gives the costing at a penny-halfpenny a pint, which places it firmly among the economical soups the dictionary recommends for everyday family use rather than for company. The bread-crumb thickening is older than roux in English practice and points back to medieval pottages, where stale bread was one of the common thickeners for a soup. The pinch of soda is a Victorian habit now abandoned: cooks of the period believed it hastened the softening of hard vegetables and fixed their colour, and it is said to do both, at a cost in nutrition and texture that was not understood at the time.