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Soup Tablets
The following recipe shows how to make the soup tablets which were so much used by the German army during the Franco-German war. Take eleven parts by weight of good suet, melt it in an iron pan, and make it very hot, so as to become brown; add, while keeping the fat stirred, eighteen parts of rye-meal, and continue heating and stirring, so as to make the mass brown; add then four parts of dried salt and two parts of coarsely pulverised caraway-seeds. The mixture is then poured into tin pans somewhat like those used for making chocolate into cakes. The cakes have the appearance of chocolate, and are chiefly intended for the use of soldiers when in the field. A quantity of about an ounce of this preparation is sufficient to yield, when boiled with some water, a ration of good soup, and in case of need, the cakes being agreeable to the taste, they may even be eaten raw.
This is a browned-roux ration cake: fat, meal, salt and spice, cooked together and moulded. It works, but the proportions are military rather than domestic, and the salt in particular wants rethinking.
- Reading "parts by weight"The recipe is a ratio, not a quantity: 11 fat : 18 meal : 4 salt : 2 caraway, 35 parts in all. A convenient trial batch is 110 g suet, 180 g rye meal, 40 g salt and 20 g caraway, which yields about 350 g, or roughly a dozen one-ounce tablets.
- The hinge is the browningEverything depends on cooking the meal in the hot fat until it is genuinely brown and smells nutty, not merely warm. An underbrowned tablet tastes of raw flour when reconstituted; a scorched one turns the whole batch bitter. Keep it moving over moderate heat and pull it the moment the colour deepens past mid-tan.
- SuetBeef suet from a butcher, chopped and rendered, gives the firm cake the recipe assumes. Packaged shredded suet is already mixed with flour, so allow for that in the meal; vegetable shortening sets softer and goes rancid faster than the original.
- Rye-mealThis is coarsely ground whole rye, closer to modern medium rye meal or pumpernickel flour than to light rye baking flour. Fine white rye works but gives a smoother, less interesting result.
- Salt at field-ration strengthFour parts in thirty-five is about 11 per cent salt by weight, so a one-ounce tablet carries something over 3 g of salt. That was intended for men in the field. For eating at home, halve the salt and season the finished soup instead.
- MouldingThe "tin pans... used for making chocolate into cakes" are simply shallow bar moulds. A silicone ice-cube tray or a small loaf tin scored into squares before the fat sets does the same job. The original has the mixture poured in while still hot and fluid.
- Making the soupOne ounce to roughly 300-350 ml of water. Whisk the tablet into cold water, bring to a simmer and hold it there five to ten minutes so the rye cooks out; dropping it into boiling water leaves lumps of fat and raw meal.
- KeepingRendered fat and toasted meal keep for weeks in a cool, dark, dry place, but the fat will eventually oxidise and taste stale. Wrap the tablets individually and refrigerate or freeze if they are to be kept beyond a month.
Portable soup was an old idea by 1870: eighteenth-century cooks boiled veal stock down to a hard, glue-like cake that travellers and naval surgeons carried in tins. What changed in the nineteenth century was the move from reduced stock to a fat-and-meal concentrate that supplied calories as well as flavour, which is what this tablet is - essentially a brown roux cast into a bar, needing only water and heat. The Prussian army's interest in such rations is generally traced to the pea-flour-and-fat sausage known as Erbswurst, taken up by the military in the years before the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and issued widely during it. The caraway is the giveaway that this is a Central European recipe: it is the standard seasoning for rye bread across the German-speaking lands, and it does more here than flavour, since caraway was long held to settle a heavy, fatty meal.