Home › The Principles of Cookery › Semolina Soup
Semolina Soup
Take any kind of nicely-flavoured stock, and let it boil. Drop into it as much semolina as will thicken it, and keep stirring for fear it should burn. Let it simmer gently until done enough, and serve very hot. Time to simmer, ten minutes. From one to two ounces of semolina will thicken a quart of stock.
A one-line soup that lives or dies on the ratio and the stirring. The original gives you both numbers, which is more than most Victorian soup entries manage.
- The ratio1-2 oz semolina per quart (roughly 3 tablespoons to a third of a cup per litre). The lower end gives a broth with body; the upper end gives something distinctly thicker. Start at 1 oz and judge after it has swelled.
- Add it as rain, not a heapSemolina clumps the instant it hits liquid in a mass. Let it fall through your fingers into the boiling stock in a thin stream while whisking, and the lumps never form.
- Ten minutes is rightUnlike many timings in these books, this one stands. Durum semolina needs roughly that long to hydrate fully; pulled early it stays gritty on the tongue.
- Semolina, not semolina pudding mixWhat is wanted is plain durum wheat semolina. Fine cream-of-wheat style farina works but thickens faster and sets stiffer as it cools.
- "Nicely-flavoured stock"The semolina adds starch and almost no taste, so the stock is the entire dish. A well-reduced chicken or veal stock, properly salted, is the point; a weak stock produces glue.
- It thickens again off the heatThe soup will be noticeably stiffer at the table than in the pan. Keep it looser than looks right, and thin with hot stock if it sets while standing.
- Yield and finishingA quart serves about four as a first course. Grated Parmesan, a little butter stirred in at the end, or a beaten egg drizzled through the hot soup are all plausible additions, though the original calls for none of them.
Semolina is the coarse middlings left when hard wheat is milled, and by the nineteenth century it was familiar in British kitchens largely as a nursery pudding. Its appearance here marks it as one of the useful thickeners a cook was expected to know alongside arrowroot, tapioca and sago: cheap, keeps well, turns a pot of stock into a filling course. Continental cookery had long done the same thing more deliberately, in the German Griessuppe and the Italian semolino in brodo, both of which survive as invalid and children's food; the small semolina dumpling, Griessnockerl, is the same idea bound with egg. The brevity of the entry is itself informative.