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Savoy Soup
Boil a moderate-sized savoy in the usual way till tender. Put it into a colander, and press the water from it, then turn it into a clean stewpan, pour over it as much beef, veal, or chicken broth as will thoroughly cover it, place the lid on the stewpan, and let its contents simmer gently for an hour. Dissolve four ounces of sweet butter in a separate saucepan, and stir as much flour into this as will make a smooth paste. Beat the mixture briskly over the fire until it is lightly coloured without being at all burnt, slice two onions into it, and fry them lightly. Moisten the paste with a little of the boiling soup, add it gradually to the rest, and boil the whole a few minutes longer. Skim the soup carefully, and mix with it a quart of boiling milk. If liked, a few crackers may be soaked in the milk before it is added to the soup. Serve very hot. Time, two hours. Probable cost, 9d. per quart. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
A cabbage soup thickened with a browned roux and finished with milk. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the instructions will hurt the result if followed literally.
- What a savoy isA savoy is savoy cabbage — the crinkled, loose-headed winter type. "Moderate-sized" is not defined here; a head of around 2 lb trimmed is a reasonable reading.
- The double cookingThe cabbage is boiled tender, drained hard, then simmered an hour in broth. Modern palates find that second hour turns it grey and sulphurous. Boil the cabbage only until it yields, and give it 20-30 minutes in the broth.
- "Boil in the usual way"The phrase is not explained on this page. The standard Victorian method was to quarter and core the cabbage and boil it uncovered in salted water until the thick ribs give to a knife.
- The rouxFour ounces of butter with "as much flour as will make a smooth paste" is about 4 oz flour by weight, roughly one cup. Cook it to a light hazel colour only; the recipe's warning against burning is the hinge, since a scorched roux will taint the whole pot.
- Onions in the rouxSliced raw onion added to a hot brown roux will brown on the outside before it softens. Sweat the onions in the butter first, then stir in the flour, and the finished soup will be sweeter.
- Tempering the pasteLoosening the roux with a ladle of the hot soup before it goes into the pot is the step that keeps the soup from going lumpy. Do not skip it.
- The milkA quart of boiling milk into a pot this size makes a thin, pale soup — expect something closer to a cabbage chowder than a purée. Add it off a hard boil and do not let the soup return to a rolling boil afterwards, or the milk will catch on the base.
- CrackersVictorian crackers were plain hard biscuits, closer to a water biscuit or ship's biscuit than to a modern salted cracker. Soda crackers or plain water biscuits do the same job; salted crackers will add salt to the soup as they dissolve.
- Yield and costEight to ten as a first course, or five or six as a supper dish. The "9d. per quart" is late-Victorian pence and is only useful as a signal that this was cheap food.
Savoy cabbage takes its name from the Duchy of Savoy in the western Alps, and the crimped-leaf winter cabbages have long been associated with that region, though the connection is traditional rather than documented in any single source. Cassell's places this among a long run of vegetable soups built on the same template: a cheap vegetable stewed soft in whatever broth the kitchen had going, bound with a butter-and-flour roux, then let down with milk. The pattern belonged to a period when a household kept stockpot broth as a matter of routine and when the price per quart mattered enough to print — ninepence a quart put this at the thrifty end of a book that also tells you how to dress a turtle. Cabbage was the reliable winter green in Britain before refrigerated shipping, and soups like this one were how a household ate vegetables from November to March.