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SIMPLE SOUP (another way)
Take three quarts of good gravy. Put it into a saucepan with two carrots, three or four turnips, three or four potatoes, some celery, lettuce, endive, parsley, and a piece of butter, with a little flour. Stew till the vegetables become quite tender, so as to permit them to be rubbed through a sieve, after which let them be put back to the soup. Stew again for about a quarter of an hour, and season to taste. If too strong, add a little water.
A Victorian purée soup built on brown stock rather than water, with the vegetables sieved back into it for body. The instructions assume a cook who already knows the house stockpot; the quantities below fill in what the original leaves open.
- "Good gravy" is stock, not sauceIn nineteenth-century kitchen usage gravy means a strong brown meat broth, usually beef or veal bones browned and simmered long. Use a well-reduced unsalted beef or veal stock; a thickened pan gravy will turn the soup pasty.
- Three quartsAbout 3.4 litres if read as imperial quarts (six imperial pints), rather less if read as US quarts. Either way it is a large pot, probably eight to ten generous servings, which is the scale a Victorian household soup was written for; halve it freely.
- The vegetable quantitiesThe original gives two carrots, and three or four turnips and potatoes each, meaning medium roots; call it something over a pound of turnip and of potato. Celery, lettuce, endive and parsley are aromatics rather than bulk: a couple of celery stalks, a head of lettuce, a handful of endive leaves, a few parsley stems.
- Butter and flourThe "piece of butter, with a little flour" is a light thickening; something like 2 oz of each would suit this quantity, though the book gives no figure. The original puts everything into the pan together; if you would rather not taste raw flour, cook the butter and flour for a minute or two before the stock goes in.
- SievingRubbing through a hair sieve was the usual purée method, alongside the mortar and the tammy cloth. A food mill gives the closest texture; a blender gives a smoother, slightly gluier result with the potato, so pulse rather than run it.
- Lettuce and endive timingThe leaves collapse in a few minutes while the turnips need twenty-five. The original stews everything together, but you may prefer to add the salad greens near the end of the first stewing so they keep their colour.
- The second stewingA quarter of an hour after the purée returns is there to marry the flour and the stock, not to cook anything further. Stir it, since the potato solids catch on the base of the pan.
- SeasoningThe book seasons last, as most stock-based soups do. Taste before adding anything; a purée thickened with flour also wants more pepper than you expect, and a squeeze of lemon lifts it.
This is the plainest form of what Victorian cookery books called a purée soup: stock, roots, a little roux, and everything driven through a hair sieve by hand. Recipes like this assumed the household already kept a stockpot going and needed only to be shown what to do with a day's worth of gravy. The presence of lettuce and endive in a soup surprises modern readers, but braising salad greens was ordinary practice before they were understood mainly as salad; both appear in English and French soup recipes of the period as softening, faintly bitter aromatics. The instruction "if too strong, add a little water" suggests a real kitchen: homemade stock varied from week to week, and the cook was expected to judge by taste rather than by measure.