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Hasty Soup
Take three tea-spoonfuls of Bovril, two of tomato sauce, and a little salt and pepper. Stir all these into a pint of hot water and bring to the boil. Let it boil for a few minutes, and the soup is ready.
A three-minute store-cupboard soup that depends entirely on the quality of two bottled products. The proportions are sound; the salt is the only thing that needs watching.
- Hold back the saltBovril is very salty, and bottled tomato sauce adds more. Boil the soup first, taste, and season only at the end — three teaspoons of extract in a pint is already at the edge of what most palates want.
- The pintCassell's is British, so this is an imperial pint of 20 fl oz, about 570 ml. Using a US 16 fl oz pint gives a noticeably stronger, saltier result; add a splash more water if that is what you have.
- Tomato sauceIn an English book of this period this most likely means the thin, spiced bottled condiment of the same family as modern ketchup — not a cooked Italian-style pasta sauce. Ketchup is the closest match; it is sweeter than the Victorian article, so start with a little less.
- BovrilStill sold, and still the right thing. Marmite is not a substitute — it is yeast-based and far more assertive. A concentrated beef stock pot or a good jellied beef stock works, though you will need to adjust volume, as these are less strongly flavoured spoon for spoon.
- "Boil for a few minutes"Two or three minutes is plenty, and only to marry the flavours. Prolonged boiling drives off the aromatic top notes of the extract and concentrates the salt further.
- YieldA pint serves two as a cup before a meal, or one generous bowl. It scales directly if you want more.
- Worth addingA spoonful of sherry or a grating of pepper at the table lifts it considerably, as does a squeeze of lemon to cut the salinity.
This is a recipe for a branded convenience product rather than a dish in the older sense. Bovril, a concentrated beef extract, was developed in the 1870s and 1880s and was heavily marketed in Britain through the end of the century as a restorative for invalids, travellers and the overworked. "Hasty" recipes — hasty pudding, hasty soup — form a small, honest genre in Victorian cookery books, aimed at the household without a cook or the nurse who needed something hot at short notice. It also marks a shift worth noting: a pint of beef broth had until recently meant hours of simmering bones, and here it is a matter of minutes.