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POTATO SOUP (another way) (Boil some potatoes in stock)
Boil some potatoes in stock; mash them, and mix them with forcemeat made of chopped meat, bacon, and spice, herbs, and eggs. Make balls of these ingredients, roll them to the size of an egg, and either warm or fry them in the soup.
A terse Victorian sketch rather than a worked recipe: no quantities, no timings, and a finished dish that is closer to a broth with dumplings than to what we now call potato soup. The points below fill in what a modern cook has to supply.
- Nothing is measuredThe original gives no quantities at all, and no timings; it assumes the reader already knows what a forcemeat is. As a workable modern starting point, about 1 lb floury potatoes to 8 oz minced meat, 2 oz bacon and 1 egg makes balls that hold together.
- Stock means real stockThe potatoes are boiled in stock, not water, and that stock becomes the soup. Use a well-flavoured brown or veal stock; a cube dissolved in water will taste thin once the starch from the potatoes has clouded it.
- ForcemeatVictorian forcemeat is a seasoned mixture of finely chopped or minced meat bound with egg, often with breadcrumbs or suet; the meat could be raw or cooked. Here it is chopped rather than pounded, which gives a coarser mixture.
- "Spice" and "herbs"The recipe names neither. Mace or nutmeg with black pepper, and parsley or thyme, would all be at home in a book of this date; mace is a safe choice if you want to avoid the sweetness nutmeg can bring.
- The hinge: cook the balls through"Either warm or fry them in the soup" understates the job if you use raw meat and raw egg, as the mixture is likely to contain. Give an egg-sized ball a genuine simmer — reckon on 10-15 minutes — until the centre reaches at least 160F. Frying first browns the outside but does not cook the middle.
- Keep the soup below a boilA hard boil breaks egg-bound forcemeat balls apart and turns the potato-thickened broth cloudy and gluey. Hold it at a bare tremble.
- Egg-sized is largeBalls that size make this a main course. Two or three per person with the broth serves four from the ratio above; halve the size if you want it as a first course.
Potato soups appear in English cookery books in a variety of forms, and Cassell's gives several versions of them. This particular "another way" resembles a Central European idea wearing English clothes: a meat stock, potato thickening, and egg-bound forcemeat balls poached in the liquid recall the pattern of the German and Austrian Klösse or Knödel soups, though the likeness is not evidence of a documented line of descent. The instruction to use "chopped meat, bacon, and spice" also suggests the period's habit of building a second dish out of the remains of a first, the soup being as much a way of using such scraps up as a recipe in its own right.