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Spinach Soup
Wash some freshly-gathered young spinach leaves. Shred finely as many as will fill a large basin, and put with them a lettuce, also finely shredded, and two or three leaves of sorrel. Throw them into boiling water, and let them boil quickly for five or six minutes. Drain them, put them into plenty of cold water to preserve the colour, and squeeze the moisture from them. Dissolve two ounces of butter in a saucepan. Mix it smoothly with a heaped table-spoonful of flour; add the vegetables gradually, and when they are roughly blended with the butter and flour, pour in, little by little, two quarts of boiling water or vegetable stock. Boil all gently together for a quarter of an hour. Put in, off the fire, a gill of boiling milk or cream, and pepper and salt, if required, and serve very hot. Time, about an hour.
SPINACH SOUP (a la Francaise). Make as much clear stock as will be needed, and put it boiling hot into the tureen. Have ready some spinach boiled in the usual way. Press this till quite dry, season with pepper and salt, and make it into balls the size of a walnut. Gently and carefully slip these into the golden-coloured stock. The contrasting colours in the soup will have a very good appearance.
A butter-and-flour green soup of the kind Victorian cooks made from whatever the kitchen garden gave up in May. The measurements are given by vessel rather than weight, so a little judgement is needed at the start.
- A large basin of shredded leavesPerhaps a quart or two of loosely packed shred; the exact quantity is left to the cook's judgement. With a whole lettuce added it should feel like far too much greenery for the pan; it collapses to almost nothing.
- A gillA quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, a little over half a US cup. Add it off the heat as the recipe directs.
- SorrelRarely sold in supermarkets; look for it at farmers' markets in spring or grow it. Two or three leaves are there for sharpness, so a teaspoon of lemon juice stirred in at the end covers the same ground, though less roundly.
- The cold-water shockThis is the hinge. Blanched greens dropped straight into cold water hold their colour; left to cool in their own steam they turn olive. Squeeze them genuinely dry afterwards or the roux will slacken into paste.
- The quarter-hour simmerLong enough to cook out the flour, but it will cost you some of the green you just worked to keep. Ten minutes is enough if you have used stock rather than water, and the soup is better for it.
- BlendingThe original leaves the soup rough and leafy. A stick blender at the end gives the smooth version most people now expect; period cookery books do sometimes direct such soups through a sieve, though this one does not.
- YieldTwo quarts of liquid plus the greens serves eight as a first course. "Time, about an hour" is the whole operation including washing and shredding, not any single step.
- The French versionEssentially a garnish rather than a separate recipe: dry spinach balls dropped into hot consommé. Squeeze the spinach harder than seems reasonable or the balls will disintegrate and cloud the stock, which defeats the point of the colour contrast.
Green soups built on a roux and thinned with stock were standard spring cookery in nineteenth-century England, and the pairing of spinach with sorrel and lettuce is a familiar one. The recipe demonstrates two lessons at once: how a butter-and-flour liaison carries a vegetable pur uree, and how blanching and cooling preserves chlorophyll \it it works. The second version, " su la Fran su suaise", reflects the late-Victorian enthusiasm for soups judged on appearance as much as flavour; clear golden consomm su with dark green garnish was the sort of effect a cook was expected to produce.