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Cheese Soup, Without Meat
Grate very finely half a pound of rather dry Gruyere or any other light-coloured cheese; strew a layer of it at the bottom of the soup tureen, and over this place two or three very thin slices of the stale crumb of bread. Repeat this until all the cheese is used, when one-fourth of the depth of the tureen should be occupied. Put a piece of fresh butter about the size of an egg into a saucepan; let it melt, and stir into it, very smoothly, a table-spoonful of flour, and let it remain on the fire, stirring it constantly, until it browns; then throw in two table-spoonfuls of finely-minced onions. When they are browned, stir in gradually a quart of water, let it boil, season with pepper and salt, and just before pouring it into the tureen, brown it with a little burnt sugar (see CARAMEL). Let the soup stand a couple of minutes before the fire to soak the bread and cheese, and when that is done, serve at once. The contents of the tureen should not be disturbed till it appears on the table. Time, one hour. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A meatless onion-and-flour soup poured over layered cheese and stale bread — essentially a brown-roux cousin of French soupe à l'oignon gratinée, assembled in the tureen rather than browned under heat. Two details decide whether it works: the liquid must be at a rolling boil and the tureen must be hot.
- Butter "the size of an egg"About 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. With a tablespoon of flour that gives a very loose roux, which is what allows it to brown deeply without scorching.
- The quartCassell's is an English book, so this is an imperial quart, 40 fl oz or about 5 cups. An American quart of 4 cups gives a noticeably thicker, saltier soup for the same amount of cheese.
- Brown the roux properlyCook the butter and flour until it is the colour of a hazelnut before the onions go in. This is the only source of flavour in a soup with no stock, and stopping at pale blond leaves it tasting of raw flour and water.
- Burnt sugarThe caramel is purely for colour — a teaspoon of sugar cooked to dark mahogany and dissolved in a spoonful of water, or a few drops of the bottled gravy browning that replaced it. Skip it without loss if the roux is dark enough.
- Heat the tureenPour a kettle of boiling water into the tureen, let it stand, and tip it out just before layering. A cold vessel drops the boiling soup below the point where Gruyère will soften, and the cheese stays in rubbery sheets.
- Two minutes is optimisticAllow five to eight minutes covered, somewhere warm, for a half-pound of grated cheese and several layers of bread to soften. The recipe adds that the contents should not be disturbed until the tureen reaches the table, which suggests the layers were meant to arrive intact.
- BreadStale crumb means the interior of a day-old white loaf, crusts removed, cut thin. Fresh bread dissolves into paste; a coarse sourdough will not soften in the time given.
- Season at the endHalf a pound of Gruyère carries a lot of salt into the tureen. Season the liquid lightly and correct only after tasting a spoonful that has hit the cheese.
- Time and yieldThe stated hour covers grating, layering and the roux; active cooking is nearer 25 minutes. Four to five as a first course, two as supper.
Cheese and bread soaked in a hot savoury liquid is one of the oldest ways of making bread go further, and this version sits between the cheese-and-onion soups of the Alpine dairy regions and the French onion soup. Its place in Cassell's is explained by the subtitle: without meat. A dictionary of cookery aimed at middle-class households may well have wanted dishes for Fridays, for Lent, and for the many weeks when no stockpot was running, and here a browned flour roux thinned with plain water stands in for broth, the browning being intended to give the finished soup something of the dark colour a beef stock would have supplied. Gruyère is specified, though the recipe's willingness to accept "any other light-coloured cheese" suggests it was not always to be had.