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Poor Man's Soup, Dr. Kitchener's
Wash a quarter of a pound of Scotch barley in two or three waters. Drain it, and put it into a large stewpan with four ounces of sliced onion and five quarts of water. Boil the liquid, skim it, and let it simmer gently for an hour, then pour it out. Put into the pan two ounces of clear beef dripping and two ounces of fat bacon cut into dice. When these are melted, stir in four ounces of oatmeal, and rub these to a smooth paste with the back of a wooden spoon. When well mixed, add the barley liquid very gradually, first by spoonfuls. Stir frequently until it boils. Season with salt, pepper, and a little allspice; boil a quarter of an hour longer, and serve. If liked, the flavour of this soup can be varied by frying a larger portion of onion or a little carrot and celery with the bacon. Time, two and a half to three hours. Probable cost, 1d. per quart. Sufficient for twelve persons.
A frugal barley-and-oatmeal soup thickened by a fat-and-meal roux rather than by stock. The technique is the whole recipe: get the oatmeal paste smooth and let it down slowly, or the soup will be lumpy and raw-tasting.
- Scotch barley is not pearl barleyScotch (or pot) barley is hulled but not polished, so it keeps more of the bran and takes considerably longer to soften than pearl barley. Pearl barley works, but it will break down sooner and thicken the liquid more; start checking it well before the hour is up.
- The oatmealNineteenth-century oatmeal here means dry pinhead or medium ground oatmeal, not rolled oats and not instant. Rolled oats will not rub to a paste with the fat in the same way; medium oatmeal or fine-cut steel-cut oats are the closest match.
- Beef dripping and fat baconClear dripping is rendered beef fat, strained free of the browned sediment at the bottom of the pot. Any solid beef fat or lard serves; the diced fat bacon should be fatty streaky or unsmoked belly, cut small so it renders rather than fries.
- Letting down the rouxThis is the hinge. Add the hot barley liquid a spoonful at a time at first, working each addition smooth before the next, exactly as for a sauce. Dumping it in at once gives lumps that never disperse, and the oatmeal will settle and catch on the base if you stop stirring.
- Quantities and volumeA quarter pound of barley is about 115 g, four ounces of onion roughly one medium onion, four ounces of oatmeal about 115 g, and two ounces each of dripping and bacon about 55 g. Five imperial quarts is about 5.7 litres, so a stockpot of at least 7 litres is wanted.
- The stated timeAn hour's simmer for the barley plus a quarter hour after the oatmeal goes in does not add to the two and a half to three hours given, and the book does not account for the difference. Treat the soup as done when the barley is tender and the oatmeal no longer tastes floury.
- SeasoningAllspice in a soup of this kind is best used sparingly, a good pinch of the ground spice or three or four whole berries fished out before serving. With no stock behind it, the salt has to do most of the work, so season at the end and taste more than once.
- Yield and costTwelve servings of roughly half a litre each, less whatever evaporates. The penny a quart is a claim about economy, not a measure of anything a modern cook can price.
Dr. William Kitchiner (the spelling varies from book to book) was a wealthy London gentleman-cook, generally styled 'Doctor' though whether he ever practised medicine is doubtful, whose The Cook's Oracle, first published in 1817, was one of the most widely reprinted English cookery books of the century; Cassell's, compiled decades later, still traded on his name as a mark of authority. Soups like this belong to a genre of published charity recipes that ran from Count Rumford's soup kitchens of the 1790s through the Victorian era, in which cooks and reformers competed to feed a person on the smallest possible sum and printed the cost per quart as proof. The construction here, fat and oatmeal rubbed to a paste and let down with barley water, reads as northern British practice adapted to a metropolitan audience, and it works because the meal and barley supply both body and substance without a scrap of meat beyond the diced bacon and the dripping.