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Hessian Soup
Take half an ox's head, clean and rub it well with salt, and let it soak in lukewarm water for four or five hours. Put it into a large stewpan with six quarts of water, and let it simmer until tender, then take it out; when the broth is cool, remove the fat, return the broth to the saucepan, and put with it a pint of soaked split peas, six carrots, six onions, three turnips, a tea-spoonful of bruised celery-seed, tied in muslin, a bunch of savoury herbs, and a blade of mace. Simmer again without the ox's head until the vegetables are tender. Press them through a colander and afterwards through a sieve. Put the pulp into the soup, add salt and Jamaica pepper to taste, and a lump of sugar. Let it boil up once more and serve. It should be as thick as ordinary pea-soup. Time, four hours. Probable cost, 10d. per quart. Sufficient for twelve or fourteen persons.
A long-simmered pea and root soup built on the broth from an ox head — cheap, thick and enormous in yield. Almost everything here still works; the main adjustments are sourcing the head and deciding how much you want to strain.
- Half an ox headA butcher will need notice, and will usually split and skin it for you. If none is available, 4–5 lb of beef shin, oxtail or neck bones give a broth of similar body from the same collagen; the head is chosen for gelatine and cheapness.
- Six quarts is a stockpot jobThat is roughly 24 cups of water plus a large bone, so you need a pot of at least 12 quarts. The recipe genuinely feeds twelve to fourteen; halve everything for a household batch.
- The salt rub and soakRubbing with salt and soaking in lukewarm water for four to five hours is a cleaning step for a fresh head — it draws out blood and loosens debris. Change the water once or twice. If you substitute bones, a rinse and a hard initial skim will do the same work.
- Chill the broth to degreaseThe instruction to cool the broth before removing the fat is the important one. An ox head throws a great deal of fat, and it lifts off in a solid sheet once refrigerated overnight. Skimming it hot will leave the soup greasy.
- Jamaica pepperAllspice. A pinch of ground allspice, or three or four berries, is enough for the whole pot; it is easy to overdo.
- A blade of maceOne piece of the lacy outer covering of nutmeg, about the size of a thumbnail. Roughly a quarter teaspoon of ground mace substitutes. Fish out the blade with the herb bundle before pureeing.
- Split peasA pint here is an imperial pint, roughly 2½ cups dry, and "soaked" means several hours or overnight. Modern split peas cook down without soaking, but the timing here assumes they will collapse completely into the broth, so give them the full simmer.
- Colander then sieveAn immersion blender does this in a minute, though one pass through a sieve afterwards is worth it for the carrot and turnip fibre. The finished soup should be the consistency of ordinary pea soup — thick enough to coat a spoon.
- The lump of sugarProbably for balance against the turnip and the long-cooked onion rather than for sweetness. A single teaspoon in this volume; taste before adding more.
- Total timeThe stated four hours is cooking time only and does not obviously cover the whole process. Allow two to three hours for the head to become tender first, plus the overnight chill if you degrease properly.
The name is often said to belong to a family of nineteenth-century soups labelled after German states and regiments — Hessian, Hanoverian, Westphalian — though the story of how such names reached English cookery books, whether by military association or by the genuinely German habit of building thick pea soups on cheap pork or beef bones, is traditional rather than documented. The costing tells the story: tenpence a quart for a dish feeding fourteen was a Victorian answer to the problem of feeding a large household or a charitable kitchen. An ox head was among the cheapest things a butcher sold, and the technique here — extract the gelatine, throw away nothing but the fat, then thicken with pulses and sieved root vegetables — is the standard economical method of the period. The head itself, once boiled tender, would not have been wasted either; the meat from the cheeks and around the jaw was served separately.