Home › The Principles of Cookery › SPANISH SOUP (another way)
SPANISH SOUP (another way)
Butter a large stewpan thickly; place in it, in an even layer, two large onions cut into slices, four ounces of lean ham cut into dice, and two pounds of freshly-killed juicy beef cut into pieces two inches square. Add any bones and trimmings of meat or poultry that may be at hand, or if an old pheasant, partridge, or hen can be procured at a small expense, truss it for boiling, brown it in a saucepan with a little butter, and lay it upon the meat. Pour over these ingredients as much stock as will barely cover them, and boil quickly till it begins to thicken and look like gum. Slacken the heat of the fire, and let the saucepan remain on it till this gum has become a bright-brown colour; pour upon it two quarts of stock or water, and add a large carrot, a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a bay leaf, a piece of garlic the size of a pea, half a blade of mace, and two cloves. Let the liquor boil, skim carefully, and simmer gently till it is strong and pleasantly flavoured. Strain it, and when cold remove the fat from the surface. Prepare about a pint and a half of mixed vegetables, such as carrots, turnips, leeks, celery, and Spanish peas. Let these be cut into strips or shapes of an equal size, and partially boil them in plain water. Boil the soup, throw the vegetables into it, and let them remain until done enough. About twenty minutes before the soup is to be served, put into it some small pork sausages, and when these are done enough, serve them with the vegetables in the tureen with the soup. Time, two hours to simmer the stock. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. per pint.
This is a two-stage soup: a heavily reduced brown stock built on a caramelised meat glaze, then a garnish of vegetables and sausage added at the end. Almost everything depends on the first stage.
- The "gum" is the whole recipeBoiling the meat in barely enough stock to cover, then letting it reduce until it looks like gum and colours bright brown, is a deliberate glaze — the sugars and proteins in the stock caramelising on the pan bottom. Take it to a deep russet and no further; the moment it smells scorched the finished soup will be bitter and no amount of dilution will fix it.
- Spanish peasMost likely chickpeas (garbanzos), though the recipe groups them with vegetables to be cut into even shapes. If using dried chickpeas, soak overnight and cook 45-90 minutes on their own before they join the other vegetables; tinned chickpeas can simply be added with the rest.
- "Freshly-killed juicy beef"A period way of saying not dried out or long-hung. Any well-marbled braising cut — chuck, shin, brisket — does the job. Two pounds is about 900 g.
- The old birdAn aged pheasant, partridge or boiling fowl was cheap because it was too tough to roast, and its connective tissue gave body to the stock. A supermarket substitute is a couple of pounds of chicken wings or a bone-in thigh pack, browned first as directed.
- Mace and garlicHalf a blade of mace is roughly a quarter teaspoon of ground mace; the recipe adds it with the stock at the start of the simmer. A piece of garlic the size of a pea is about a quarter of a small clove — the book is aiming at a background note, not a pronounced garlic flavour.
- Simmering timeThe recipe allows two hours for the stock. Keep it at a bare tremble rather than a rolling boil, or the fat will emulsify into the liquid and cloud the soup.
- Chilling and skimmingThe instruction to cool the strained stock and lift the fat is worth following literally. Overnight in the refrigerator sets the fat into a solid cap you can lift off whole, and it lets you check whether the stock has enough gelatine to set to a light jelly.
- The sausagesTwenty minutes of gentle simmering will cook small fresh pork sausages through, but check the centre reaches 71C/160F before serving. Prick them or slice them after cooking rather than before, so the fat stays inside.
- YieldAbout two quarts of finished soup plus a pint and a half of vegetables — six to eight servings as a first course. The meat from the first stage has given up its flavour to the stock and is not returned to the soup.
Cassell's gives this as an alternative to its first Spanish soup, and what makes it "Spanish" to a Victorian English kitchen is mostly the chickpeas and the pork sausage — the two signatures of the Spanish cocido and olla, one-pot meals in which meat, sausage and garbanzos simmer together and the broth is served first, the solids after. The technique, though, is entirely French: browning meat down to a glaze in a buttered pan before adding liquid is closer to the making of a fond or glace than to the classic espagnole, itself named for Spain by a tradition that is repeated far more often than it is documented. The recipe casually suggests procuring an old pheasant, partridge or hen "at a small expense" — game past its roasting prime and worn-out laying hens were the cheap, gelatinous backbone of good stock throughout the nineteenth century. The costing of 1s. 6d. per pint marks it as a dish for a household with a cook, not a labourer's kitchen.