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Melton Mowbray Soup
Fillet two medium-sized haddocks with the skin on; lay them on a buttered stewpan or saute-pan previously sprinkled with six finely-chopped shallots, a table-spoonful of minced parsley, and a pinch of finely-powdered mace. Take the heads, bones, and trimmings, and set them in a separate saucepan over the fire for a few minutes, then add two quarts of good white stock; simmer for half an hour. Blanch and beard fifty oysters; add their liquor to the stock, and the oysters to the fillets; thicken the soup with roux (see ROUX, WHITE), and when well skimmed add it to the fillets previously slightly fried. Let it boil five minutes; add half a pint of Madeira, the juice of half a lemon, and season with cayenne to taste. Probable cost, 6s. Sufficient for twelve persons.
A late-Victorian fish soup that reads as a rich haddock-and-oyster stew. Most of the work is stock and restraint; the oysters are the part that goes wrong.
- Oysters firstFifty oysters is roughly four dozen shucked, perhaps a pound or so of meats with their liquor depending on size. "Blanch and beard" was standard Victorian practice; shucked oysters today need no more than a minute or two in the hot soup, added at the very end off direct heat, or they shrink and turn to rubber.
- Two quarts of white stockWhite stock in Cassell's means a pale veal or chicken stock made without browning. Here it is poured onto the sweated fish heads and bones, so the finished liquid is effectively a double stock; a light chicken stock works, and avoid anything dark or heavily reduced.
- The haddockTwo medium haddocks give about 2 lb of fillet. Skin on holds the fillets together during the brief cooking; unsmoked haddock is meant, not the yellow-dyed smoked kind, which would overwhelm the Madeira.
- Roux, whiteThe cross-reference means butter and flour in roughly equal weight cooked without colour; add enough to give a soup the thickness of thin cream rather than a sauce. Whisk it into the simmering stock and skim as directed before it meets the fish.
- MeasuresHalf a pint here is the imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz, or about 1 1/4 US cups. A pinch of powdered mace is genuinely a pinch: half a teaspoon will take over.
- "Previously slightly fried"The instruction is muddled in the original — the fillets are laid on the buttered pan at the start, then described as already fried when the soup is added. Read it as: set the fillets on the buttered shallot bed, let them take a little colour and firm up over gentle heat, then pour the thickened stock over.
- Timing and yieldFive minutes at a bare boil is enough for 3/4-inch fillets; longer and they break into shreds. The book says twelve persons, which is right for a soup course rather than a main dish.
- FinishingLemon juice and cayenne go in off the heat, as does the Madeira if you want its aroma to survive; boiling the wine hard cooks off exactly what it was added for.
Melton Mowbray, in Leicestershire, is a town known for pork pies and as a centre of the Quorn and Belvoir hunts, and it has no coastline and no oyster beds, which makes the title a name rather than a geographical claim. Victorian cookery books are often said to have attached the names of hunting towns, clubs and country houses to rich soups and savouries served at sporting dinners, and a haddock-and-oyster soup fortified with Madeira is very much a dish for a long table of cold, hungry people. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the same decades, gives costs for its recipes, and 6s for a soup for twelve puts this at the ambitious end of a middle-class household's repertoire.