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Pumpkin and Rice Soup
Wash a quarter of a pound of rice, and boil it gently until it is almost soft. Drain it, and put it aside. Pare a small pumpkin, take out the seeds, and slice the whole or half of it. Take the slices, and put these in a saucepan, with two large onions, two cloves, four or five sticks of celery, a sprig of parsley, a tea-spoonful of sugar, a little pepper and salt, and two quarts of water. Simmer all gently together until the vegetables are quite soft, then rub them through a colander, and keep back the fibrous portion. Set the puree, with the liquor that has run through the colander with it, again upon the fire, add the rice, and boil gently until the latter is tender. Serve very hot. The soup will be much improved if nicely-flavoured stock, or the liquor in which meat has been boiled, be used instead of water. Time, two hours and a half. Probable cost of pumpkins, uncertain. Sufficient for seven or eight persons.
A straightforward vegetable purée thickened with rice, and one of the few Victorian pumpkin recipes that treats the vegetable as savoury rather than pie filling. The main adjustment is timing: two and a half hours is far longer than either the pumpkin or the rice needs.
- Cut the time downSliced pumpkin simmers to collapse in 20-25 minutes, and the rice needs another 15 in the puree. Reckon on 45 minutes to an hour total rather than the two and a half hours given.
- Quarter of a pound of riceAbout 115 g, a generous half cup. Parboil it only until the grains are still chalky at the centre; it finishes in the soup and will otherwise disintegrate into paste.
- Pumpkin quantityAim for about 2 lb of peeled, seeded flesh to the two quarts of liquid; a dense-fleshed winter squash such as butternut or kabocha gives a much better result than a large carving pumpkin, which is watery and bland.
- Rub through a colanderThis is the step a blender replaces, but not exactly. The point of the colander was to hold back stringy fibre. If you blend, do it after cooking and pass the purée through a sieve if the pumpkin was at all stringy.
- The two clovesMost likely whole spice cloves rather than garlic, though the recipe does not say. Fish them out before pureeing or the soup will taste of clove alone.
- Use stockThe recipe's own closing note is the best advice in it. Water gives a thin, sweetish soup; chicken or a light meat stock gives it body. Vegetable stock works if you want it meatless.
- SeasoningA teaspoonful of sugar sounds odd in a savoury soup; taste before adding it, as modern dense squash may already be sweet enough. A squeeze of lemon at the end does more for the finished soup than the sugar does.
- YieldAs stated, seven or eight modest bowls. It thickens noticeably on standing as the rice swells, so hold back some stock to loosen it on reheating.
The dish belongs to a large family of Victorian puree soups, built on the same method used for pea, carrot or artichoke: simmer vegetables with onion and celery, force them through a sieve, return the puree to the liquor. Here rice does the thickening work a roux would do in a French potage. The recipe records the cost of pumpkins as 'uncertain', which suggests they were not a reliable market commodity in the way potatoes or turnips were. The instruction to substitute 'the liquor in which meat has been boiled' points to a kitchen in which the water from a boiled joint was kept back rather than poured away.