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Simple Soup
Cut into very small pieces half a pound of turnips, half a pound of carrots, a quarter of a pound of onions, three or four sticks of celery, and a lettuce. Put these ingredients into a saucepan which has a very closely-fitting lid with four ounces of dissolved butter, and add a bunch of sweet herbs, if liked. Cover the saucepan, and steam its contents over a gentle fire for twenty minutes. Pour upon the vegetables three pints of stock made from bones; let this boil, and carefully remove the scum as it rises. Add a pint of freshly-shelled green peas, and simmer all gently together for three hours. Rub the preparation through a sieve, boil it up once more, add pepper and salt, and serve. Time, four hours. Probable cost, 8d. per pint. Sufficient for eight or nine persons.
A purée of root vegetables sweated in butter and simmered in bone stock. The method is sound; the timings belong to an era of coal ranges and much coarser sieves.
- The hinge: the sweatThe first twenty minutes under a tight lid with butter is where the flavour is built — the vegetables should soften and go glossy without colouring. If they catch or brown, the finished soup turns muddy rather than sweet.
- Three hours is too longOnce the stock is in, 45 minutes to an hour is enough to cook everything to purée softness. The original time reflects the need to break fibrous winter vegetables down for a hair sieve; a blender does that work in thirty seconds.
- Green peasAdd them near the end, not for the full simmer. Fifteen minutes of shelled fresh peas, or five of frozen, keeps the colour and the sweetness; boiled for hours they go grey and flat.
- Four ounces of butterThat is a full stick (115 g) for about 1.5 lb of vegetables — generous but deliberate, as the fat carries the flavour into the stock. Half that amount works if you would rather a lighter soup.
- Stock made from bonesA plain, unsalted bone stock is meant; the recipe does not say which bones, and it is clearly not a reduced brown stock. Three pints is about 1.7 litres; low-sodium shop-bought stock is a fair substitute, but season only at the end as the recipe directs.
- Rubbing through a sieveA blender or stick blender replaces this entirely. If you want the silky texture the sieve gave, pass the blended soup through a fine strainer afterwards to catch celery strings and pea skins.
- Sweet herbsA bouquet of parsley, thyme and a bay leaf, tied so it can be pulled out before puréeing. Remove it before blending or the soup will taste of stalk.
- YieldThe book's eight or nine servings assume a small first-course cup. Reckon on six modern bowls from three pints of stock plus the vegetables.
This is the plain end of the nineteenth-century soup repertoire: no cream, no wine, no garnish, just roots and pot herbs sweated in butter and let down with bone stock — what French kitchens would call a potage purée de légumes. The sequence of sweat, moisten, simmer, sieve is the template on which many other named soups are built, and a cook who mastered it could vary the vegetables at will. The costing — eightpence a pint — is part of the book's standard formula, and the reliance on stock "made from bones" assumes a kitchen where a joint's remains went straight into the stockpot rather than the bin.