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Jardiniere Soup
Scrape three sound carrots and the same number of turnips, and turn them into any fanciful shapes of an equal size with a French vegetable scoop. Put them into a stewpan with a dozen button onions, two or three leaves of lettuce, tarragon, and chervil, and a head of celery cut as nearly as possible the same size as the turnips and carrots. Pour over them two quarts of nicely-seasoned clear stock, and simmer gently until the vegetables are tender. A small lump of sugar is an improvement. Taste the soup before sending it to table, in order to ascertain if further seasoning is required, and serve as hot as possible. Time, about an hour and a half. Probable cost, 4d. per quart, exclusive of the stock. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A clear vegetable soup that lives or dies by the stock and by cutting the vegetables to a uniform size. Nothing here is difficult, but the timing in the original is far longer than the vegetables want.
- The hinge: uniform cutsThe whole point of a jardinière garnish is that every piece is the same size, so everything cooks at the same rate and the bowl looks deliberate. A melon baller gives the classic small spheres; failing that, cut even 1/2-inch dice or batons.
- TimeNinety minutes will reduce scooped carrot and turnip to mush. Simmer the carrots and celery about 10 minutes, add turnip and button onions for another 8-10, and drop in the lettuce and herbs for the last two. Total cooking time under half an hour.
- French vegetable scoopA small spring-loaded or plain half-sphere cutter, sold today as a melon baller or Parisienne scoop. Blanching the trimmings into the stock is a sensible use for the considerable waste this cutting produces.
- Two quarts of clear stockEight cups. It must be genuinely clear and well seasoned, since there is no thickening, no cream and no browning to hide behind. A light chicken or veal stock is traditional; a strained vegetable stock works but tastes thinner.
- Button onionsSmall pickling or pearl onions, about an inch across. Frozen peeled pearl onions are a fair substitute and save a tedious job; add them near the end as they are already blanched.
- Tarragon and chervilFresh, and added at the very end — chervil in particular loses its perfume within a few minutes of simmering. Dried chervil is close to worthless here; if you cannot find fresh, use only tarragon and a little parsley.
- The lump of sugarRoughly a teaspoon, and it is doing real work: it rounds out the mineral edge of turnip and celery. Add it early enough to dissolve, then taste before serving as the recipe instructs.
- Yield and costSix to eight as a first course. The "4d. per quart" is a Victorian price note and carries no modern meaning.
Jardinière is the feminine of jardinier, gardener, and in nineteenth-century kitchen French it came to mean any preparation garnished with an assortment of neatly cut fresh vegetables — a jardinière of vegetables around a joint, a jardinière soup, later the jardinière as a mixed vegetable side. Its appearance in Cassell's reflects how thoroughly the vocabulary and technique of the French professional kitchen had been absorbed into English middle-class cookery books: the reader is expected to own a vegetable scoop and to keep clear stock on hand. The soup is also an exercise in a particular Victorian aesthetic, in which visible knife discipline was itself a form of luxury. There is nothing costly in three carrots and three turnips; the expense is the labour of turning them into identical shapes, and the cost note of fourpence a quart, "exclusive of the stock," quietly admits where the real money went.