Home › The Principles of Cookery › Turkey Soup, Economical
Turkey Soup, Economical
Take the bones and trimmings of a turkey (after the meat has been made into patties, or rissoles, minced, pulled, or devilled) break them into small pieces, put them into a stewpan with any forcemeat or sauce that may be left, and pour over them two quarts of stock. Bring this slowly to the boil, skim carefully, and add a little salt and pepper, a few sticks of celery, an onion, and a carrot. Let these simmer gently till the bones are quite clean. Strain the soup, and free it from fat. Add further seasoning if liked, and either thicken the soup with two ounces of ground rice or arrowroot made into a paste with a little stock and boiled up in the soup, or, if a clear soup is preferred, clarify according to the directions given for clarifying soup. Drop a little vermicelli, or macaroni, or sliced vegetables into it, let them boil a few minutes, and then serve. The clarifying process will not be necessary if the soup has been gently simmered, thoroughly skimmed, and well strained. If no stock from bones, etc., is at hand, a little may be made by boiling two pounds of the inferior parts of beef in five pints of water for two or three hours, and in this case the bones of the turkey may be stewed with the beef. Or half a pound only of fresh beef may be used, with a dessert-spoonful of Bovril dissolved in the liquor. Time, four hours.
A carcass soup built on the Victorian assumption that a turkey feeds a household for several days. The method is sound; only the vocabulary and a few proportions need translating.
- QuantitiesTwo quarts is 4 pints, about 2.3 litres in British measure, since Cassell's pint is 20 fl oz. Five pints of water for the improvised beef stock is about 2.8 litres.
- The leftover sauce and forcemeatTipping the remains of any leftover sauce and stuffing into the pot is the whole economy of the dish, but it also decides the seasoning. Taste before adding salt, since a leftover forcemeat may already be well salted.
- Skim before it boilsThe hinge of the recipe. Scum coagulates and rises as the liquid comes up to temperature; if it reaches a rolling boil it emulsifies into the stock and no amount of straining will clear it. Keep it at a bare shiver and the clarification step becomes unnecessary, exactly as the last lines say.
- "Till the bones are quite clean"Meaning until every scrap of meat and gristle has fallen away, generally three to four hours for a turkey frame. The recipe gives the time as four hours.
- ThickeningTwo ounces is about 55 g of ground rice or arrowroot, slaked in cold stock first. Arrowroot thickens on contact with heat and thins again if held at a boil, so add it last and take the pan off the heat; ground rice is more forgiving and gives a softer, slightly grainy body.
- BovrilStill sold and essentially unchanged in function: a salty beef extract paste. A dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons. Any concentrated beef base works, but hold back the salt until after it dissolves.
- Vermicelli and macaroniBoil the garnish separately and add it at the end, or the starch it sheds will cloud a soup you have taken trouble to keep clear.
- DegreasingTurkey fat sets hard when cold. Chilling the strained soup overnight and lifting the cap off is far more thorough than skimming the surface hot with a spoon.
The parenthesis says why: patties, rissoles, mince, pulled turkey and devilled turkey were the expected sequence of a large bird's afterlife in a late-Victorian household, and the soup came at the end of it, when only the frame was left. Nothing was to be thrown out, down to the cold sauce in the boat and the tail of the stuffing. The mention of Bovril dates the entry usefully: the beef extract was developed in the 1870s and 1880s and was widely advertised in Britain by the 1890s, so its appearance as a shortcut here shows a commercial product offered as a substitute for two pounds of beef and hours at the stove.