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Parsnip Soup
Put half a dozen sliced parsnips into a stewpan, with two onions, half a dozen sticks of celery, and two quarts of good light-coloured stock. Stew the vegetables until they are tender, then drain them, press them through a coarse sieve, and return the puree to the soup. Let it boil, flavour with a little salt and pepper, or cayenne, and serve very hot. A little boiling milk may be added if liked. The excessive sweetness of parsnip soup may be corrected by the addition of a little tomato, or a table-spoonful of chilli vinegar. Time, about two hours to stew the vegetables. Probable cost, 10d. per quart. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A plain white vegetable puree of the sort that anchored the soup chapter of every late-Victorian household book. Almost nothing needs changing except the cooking time.
- Cut the stewing timeTwo hours is far longer than sliced parsnips need and will leave you with a flat, faintly stewed flavour. Sliced thin, they are tender in 25 to 35 minutes; take them off as soon as a knife slides through.
- Light-coloured stockThis means a white stock — veal or chicken bones blanched and simmered without browning, so the finished soup stays pale. A good unsalted chicken stock is the modern equivalent; brown beef stock will muddy both colour and taste.
- Two quartsAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, so the original calls for roughly 2.3 litres — closer to nine and a half US cups than eight. You may want a little extra to loosen the puree at the end.
- Celery sticks"Sticks" here are stalks from the head, not whole heads. Six stalks to six parsnips is a lot of celery, and it will do something to offset the sweetness — though the recipe's own remedy for that is the tomato or chilli vinegar.
- Sieve or blenderA coarse sieve is the tool the original assumes. A blender does it faster and finer; pass it through a sieve afterwards if you want the smoothness the original was reaching for. Old parsnips have a fibrous core worth cutting out before cooking.
- The sweetness correctionTake the instruction seriously. Parsnips concentrate their sugars as they age in storage, and a puree of six of them can taste like dessert. A spoonful of tomato puree, a splash of sharp vinegar, or a squeeze of lemon all pull it back.
- Chilli vinegarA Victorian storecupboard staple: vinegar steeped with dried chillies for a week or two. Cider vinegar with a pinch of cayenne stands in for it.
- The milkAdd it boiling, off the heat, and do not let the soup return to a hard boil afterwards. Cream works equally well and is less inclined to separate against the acid of the tomato or vinegar.
- YieldFive or six as a first course, three or four as a main with bread. The book prices it at tenpence a quart.
Parsnips were a staple root of the English winter long before the potato displaced them, valued because frost improves them: cold weather converts their starch to sugar, which is exactly why this recipe ends by telling you how to fight the sweetness. Cassell's Dictionary was compiled in the 1870s. The recipe's structure is the formula for a vegetable puree soup, applied here to whatever root was cheapest, and the reflexive suggestion of tomato or chilli vinegar shows how thoroughly bottled flavourings had entered the ordinary English kitchen by then.