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Cucumber Soup
Cut the cucumbers into slices, strew a little salt over them, and place them between two plates to drain off the juice. Put them into a saucepan, and cover them with some good white stock. Simmer them gently for forty minutes, then add as much more stock as may be required, and a little sorrel. Season with salt and cayenne, and thicken the soup with ground rice or arrowroot. When it boils, draw it from the fire for a minute or two, and add a pint of milk mixed with the yolks of two eggs. The soup must not, of course, boil after the eggs are added. Time, about one hour. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. per quart. Allow one large cucumber for three pints of soup, including half a pint of milk.
A Victorian cream soup built on the old two-step method: stew the cucumber to softness in stock, then finish off the heat with an egg-and-milk liaison. The finish is where it succeeds or curdles.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the yolks and milk go in, the soup must be held below a simmer — roughly 170-180F. Warm the milk and beat the yolks into it, then stir a ladle of hot soup into that mixture before returning it all to the pan; adding cold dairy and raw yolk straight to boiling liquid is what scrambles it.
- Scale and yieldThe closing line is the real ingredient list: one large cucumber to three pints of soup, of which half a pint is milk. Three pints serves about six as a first course.
- Salting and drainingTwenty to thirty minutes between the plates is enough to pull the watery juice out. Rinse and pat dry afterwards or the seasoned soup will come out salty, since salt is added again later.
- Peel and seedsCucumbers of the period were often thicker-skinned and more coarsely seeded than modern varieties. Peel, halve and scrape out the seeds; modern thin-skinned varieties can keep a little peel, and removing the seeds keeps the soup from going watery and grainy.
- Forty minutes is longThat time suited the coarser cucumbers of the period. Modern cucumber is generally soft in around 12-15 minutes. Simmer to tenderness, not by the clock.
- SorrelA handful of leaves, shredded, added in the last few minutes — it collapses almost at once and supplies the sharpness the soup needs. If sorrel is unavailable, a squeeze of lemon at the end is the nearest thing, though it lacks the same body.
- Ground rice and arrowrootGround rice is milled rice, not the whole grain, though coarser than rice flour; slake either it or the arrowroot in a little cold stock before stirring in. Arrowroot thickens in a moment and thins if boiled hard, so add it last, after the long simmer. Around 1 tablespoon per quart gives a light body.
- White stockMeaning veal or chicken stock, unbrowned and unsalted, so the soup stays pale. A good chicken stock is the practical substitute; season only at the end, as the reduction concentrates it.
- Cayenne, not black pepperCayenne leaves no specks in a pale soup, which may be why it is specified here. A pinch is enough — this should read as warmth behind the cucumber, not heat.
- The cost line"1s. 6d. per quart" is a Victorian price note for household accounting, not an instruction. Cassell's gives such a figure with most entries.
Cucumber was commonly cooked in Victorian kitchens as well as eaten raw or pickled — stewed, stuffed, buttered, or as here reduced into a pale soup in the French manner. The construction is a textbook potage of the period: white stock, a farinaceous thickening, and a final liaison of yolks and milk, the same skeleton used for soups of lettuce, asparagus or green pea. Sorrel does the work that lemon or vinegar would do today; it was a common kitchen-garden herb in Britain through the nineteenth century and later dropped out of general use. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, an enormous alphabetical compendium of the late Victorian period, quotes a probable cost with nearly every entry, a feature suited to households keeping a close eye on the weekly books.