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Carrot Soup
Put any bones that you may have into three quarts of stock or water, with three turnips, three onions, a head of celery or half a tea-spoonful of celery-seed, two bay-leaves, and the red part of ten good-sized carrots, cut off in slices. Stew the vegetables till tender, then take out the carrots, pound them in a mortar, mix with them a little of the liquor, and pass them through a coarse sieve. Strain the rest of the liquid, and return it to the saucepan; put with it the pulped carrots, and let it boil till it is as thick as thick as pea-soup. Season with pepper and salt, and serve. Time, four hours. Probable cost, 3d. per quart. Sufficient for six persons.
A Victorian pur eated vegetable soup that relies on the carrots themselves for body rather than flour, cream or stock thickeners. Most of the updating concerns equipment and the four-hour clock.
- The hinge: use only the outer flesh"The red part" of the carrot means the sweet orange cortex, cut away from the pale, fibrous core that older varieties carried. Modern breeding has largely bred out the woody core, so with supermarket carrots you can use the whole root; if you have large old field carrots, quarter them lengthwise and trim out any dry, paler centre.
- QuantitiesThree imperial quarts is about 3.4 litres (three US quarts would be nearer 2.8 litres); read the larger measure here. Ten good-sized carrots is very roughly 2 lb / 900 g before trimming, and the recipe uses only the red part of them. The book gives it as sufficient for six persons.
- Celery seedHalf a teaspoon of celery seed stands in for a whole head of celery and is considerably more assertive than it sounds. Measure it level, and add it with the vegetables rather than at the end.
- TimeFour hours reflects a stockpot on a coal range and bones that needed long extraction. If you are starting from ready-made stock, the vegetables are tender in 30-40 minutes; the only reason to go longer is to build flavour from raw bones, which want two to three hours before the vegetables go in.
- Mortar and sievePounding and passing through a coarse sieve is what a blender or food mill now does in a minute. A food mill gives a texture closer to the original, since it holds back fibre the way the sieve did; a blender gives a smoother, slightly heavier result.
- Thickness"As thick as pea-soup" means reduced until it coats a spoon. Expect real reduction, and hold back a cup of the strained liquid to thin at the end rather than boiling hard and over-concentrating the salt.
- SeasoningWith no cream, butter or sugar, the finish rests entirely on salt and pepper. Season only after reduction, and a spoonful of butter stirred in off the heat rounds it out without departing from the character of the soup.
Carrot soup of this kind belongs to the English tradition of purees that thicken with the vegetable itself. The note of cost - threepence a quart - is as much the point of the entry as the method: this was an economical soup, built on bones that had already given service and root vegetables cheap through the winter. The instruction to use only the red part reflects the carrots of the day, which commonly had a tough, pale, comparatively flavourless core, the deep orange outer flesh being valued for both sweetness and colour. Straining the aromatics out and returning only the carrot pulp suggests the soup was meant to be smooth and unmistakably orange on the table.