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Rhubarb Soup, Sweet
Boil half a pint of cut rhubarb in a quart of water, with the rind of half a lemon and two or three thin slices of bread, till the liquor is pleasantly flavoured. Strain and sweeten it, add a glassful of light wine and a little cream, and serve. If liked, the yolks of one or two eggs may be used instead of the cream, but the soup must not boil after the eggs are added. Time, about an hour. Probable cost, exclusive of the wine, 9d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A sweet fruit soup of the kind that turns up in Victorian dictionaries under both soups and puddings. Two things decide whether it works: how far you let the rhubarb break down, and how carefully you handle the eggs if you use them instead of cream.
- The half pint of rhubarbThis is a volume measure of cut stalks, not a weight. An imperial quart of water is 40 fl oz, about 5 cups, so the soup is deliberately thin.
- Use stalks onlyRhubarb leaves contain high levels of oxalic acid and are not edible. Trim them off and discard them; only the pink and green stalk goes in the pan.
- An hour is too longThe stated time probably covers the whole operation including straining and finishing. Rhubarb collapses in 15 to 20 minutes at a bare simmer. Taste the liquor and pull it off when it is "pleasantly flavoured" as instructed.
- The bread is the thickenerTwo or three thin slices of bread break down into the liquid and give it body — there is no flour or arrowroot here. Straining removes the pulp and leaves a lightly thickened broth. Press the solids firmly through the sieve for more substance.
- A glassful of wineVictorian recipes mean a wine glass, about 2 to 2 1/2 fl oz. "Light wine" most likely means a light white such as hock or moselle; add it off the heat so the aroma survives. Sweeten with sugar to taste after straining, since rhubarb varies enormously in sharpness.
- If you use egg yolksThe warning not to boil the soup is the hinge of the recipe. Whisk the yolks with a ladleful of the hot liquid, return the mixture to the pan, and hold it below 180F / 82C, stirring, until it just coats a spoon. Any boil and it curdles into threads.
- ServingEnough for five or six as a small first or last course. It is good hot, and good chilled.
Sweet fruit soups sit oddly in an English cookery book, and their presence here reflects the nineteenth-century British kitchen's steady borrowing from Northern and Central Europe, where cold or warm soups of rhubarb, cherry, plum and dried fruit were and are ordinary household food. Rhubarb itself arrived in Britain as a medicinal root long before it was eaten: the stalks only became a common culinary item in the early nineteenth century, and forcing sheds in the West Riding of Yorkshire were beginning to supply tender early stalks to city markets in quantity from the later 1870s, at much the same time as Cassell's was being compiled. The construction of the soup — bread as thickener, wine and either cream or egg yolks to finish — is the same one used for wine and beer soups in the same period, and the costing in pence, with the wine excluded, is characteristic of Cassell's habit of pricing every dish for a middle-class reader keeping accounts.