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German Soup
Fry half an ounce of cummin-seed in a little hot butter, for a few minutes; keep moving them about all the time. Pour upon them three pints of good, nicely-flavoured chicken-broth, and simmer gently for nearly an hour. Season with pepper and salt, put some toasted sippets in the tureen, and strain the soup over them. Sufficient for three pints of soup.
A simple infusion soup: cumin bloomed in butter, steeped in chicken broth, strained over toast. Nearly everything depends on how far you take the seeds in the pan.
- The hinge: toast, don't scorchCumin can turn acrid if taken too far in the pan, and a long simmer will not necessarily mellow that bitterness. Keep the butter at a moderate heat and pull the pan as soon as the seeds smell nutty and darken a shade, two to three minutes at most.
- Cummin-seedWhole cumin seed, not ground. Half an ounce is roughly two tablespoons, which is a forceful amount for three pints; if you want the gentler version, start with one tablespoon and taste after twenty minutes of simmering.
- Imperial pintsCassell's pints are 20 fl oz, so three pints is about 7 1/4 US cups or 1.7 litres. If you use US pints you will get a noticeably more concentrated soup.
- SippetsSmall triangles or dice of bread, toasted or fried crisp. Put them in the tureen dry and pour the hot soup over at the last moment, or they collapse to paste.
- The broth does the workThere is no thickening, no aromatic base and no garnish beyond bread, so the stock is the whole dish. A well-made chicken stock with real body is worth the trouble here; a thin or salty commercial broth has nothing to hide behind.
- StrainingStrain through a fine sieve so no seeds reach the tureen. Whole cumin left in the bowl is unpleasant to bite into and keeps releasing flavour as the soup sits.
- Seasoning orderSalt at the end, as the recipe directs, tasting once the simmering is done.
- YieldThe recipe states only 'sufficient for three pints of soup' and gives no number of servings; 1.7 litres would cover roughly four to six as a first course.
Cumin was a staple of medieval and early modern European cooking that fell steeply out of English favour after the seventeenth century, surviving in Dutch and German cooking chiefly in the Leyden-type cumin cheeses -- the bread and sausage traditions of German-speaking Europe lean overwhelmingly on caraway (K onototype), a different spice altogether. That association is almost certainly what earns this soup its name in Cassell's: to a late-Victorian British reader, a pronounced cumin flavour read as German rather than as anything else. The method is a very old kind of soup, an aromatic bloomed in fat and steeped in broth, poured over bread in the bottom of the bowl; the sippets are the descendant of the medieval sop, the slice of bread soaked in broth that stands behind the word "soup" itself (Late Latin suppa).