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Olio of Vegetables
Slice half a dozen carrots, turnips, and onions, and throw them into boiling water slightly salted. Let them boil a quarter of an hour, then put with them two heads of cabbage cut into halves, and two pounds of potatoes, and boil all together until they are soft. Drain them from the water, and mince them finely. Mix with them half a pound of spinach, a little salt and pepper, an ounce and a half of fresh butter, and a quarter of a pint of cream. Cover the saucepan closely, and stew the vegetables gently for half an hour. Before serving, thicken them by stirring in with them a piece of butter rolled in flour. The vegetables may be varied according to the season. Green peas, lettuces, cucumber, spring onions, spinach, etc., may be cooked in the same way. Probable cost, according to the vegetables used. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A Victorian vegetable stew that works well if you treat the long cooking times as a stylistic choice rather than a rule. A few conversions and one restraint are all it needs.
- The quarter-pint of creamAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a US cup. Single cream or heavy cream both work; the mixture is stewed afterwards, so a higher fat content is less likely to split.
- "Half a dozen carrots, turnips, and onions"Most naturally read as six of each, though the phrasing is ambiguous. At Victorian kitchen-garden size that is somewhere around a pound of carrots, a pound of turnips and rather more of onions. Combined with two cabbages and 2 lb potatoes this is a very large pot; the recipe claims six to eight, so halving it still feeds three or four.
- Cumulative cooking timeFifteen minutes of boiling for the root vegetables, then boiling again until the cabbage and potatoes are soft, then half an hour of stewing, adds up to well over an hour. Modern practice is to boil only until just tender and let the covered stew stage finish the job, or the flavour flattens out entirely.
- The spinach goes in rawHalf a pound of spinach is stirred in uncooked at the mincing stage and collapses during the covered stewing. It also releases a good deal of water, which may help explain the thickening at the end.
- "Mince them finely"This means chopping, not pureeing. The intent is a coarse, spoonable mash where the individual vegetables are still distinguishable; a food processor will take it straight to baby food.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manié: equal weights soft butter and flour kneaded together, then stirred in in small pieces off a hard boil. About half an ounce of each is enough here. It must cook a minute or two afterwards to lose the raw flour taste.
- Covered stewing needs low heatWith only butter, cream and the vegetables' own moisture in the pan, a closed saucepan on anything above the lowest setting will catch on the bottom. Use a heavy pan and stir occasionally, despite the instruction to keep it closely covered.
- Seasoning at the endBoiling water "slightly salted" contributes little, and the finished mixture is bland without generous salt and pepper. A grating of nutmeg is the period-appropriate addition if you want one.
Olio comes into English from the Spanish olla, the cooking pot, by way of olla podrida — literally "rotten pot," the long-simmered Iberian stew of meats and vegetables. By the seventeenth century English cooks had borrowed the word for any dish of many things cooked together, and it spread outward into general usage: an olio came to mean a miscellany, a variety programme, a mixed collection of anything at all. Something of that older elastic sense survives here — note the closing licence to vary the vegetables by season. That flexibility mattered in a household economy where the kitchen garden and the market, not a fixed list, determined what was available. The cream and butter finish, though, marks it as a middle-class dish.