Home › The Principles of Cookery › Turkey Soup, Superior
Turkey Soup, Superior
Take the remains of a cold boiled or roast turkey, cut off the meat, mince it finely, pound till smooth, and put it aside till wanted. Break up the body of the bird into small pieces, put these into a stewpan with two quarts of nicely-flavoured white stock, and let them simmer gently for one hour and a half. Strain the gravy, let it cool, skim off the fat, and season with salt and cayenne. Cut a quarter of a pound of stale crumb of bread into thin slices, soak these for a few minutes in as much of the stock as they will absorb, let them simmer a few minutes, and afterwards squeeze the pulp in a cloth till it is quite dry. Mix this thoroughly with the flesh of the turkey which was put aside, add the soup gradually and smoothly to the paste, and rub the whole through a fine sieve with the back of a wooden spoon. Let it boil once more, add salt and cayenne as required, and just before serving add a pint of boiling cream or milk. If the soup is not sufficiently thick, it may be made so by adding an ounce of arrowroot or ground rice made into a smooth batter with a little cold milk and boiled in it before the cream is added. The soup ought to be of the consistency of thick cream. If no white stock is at hand, a little may be made as follows. Divide two pounds of the scrag-end of a neck of veal, or a calf's foot well cleaned, or a knuckle-bone of veal, into small pieces, put them into a saucepan with five pints of cold water, a slice of lean ham, a carrot, a turnip, three onions, a blade of mace, half a tea-spoonful of peppercorns, a few outer sticks of celery, a bunch of parsley, and a sprig of thyme. Let all simmer gently for three hours. Strain the soup, let it get cold, remove the fat, add a little salt, and it will be ready for use. If there be any liquor in which mutton, veal, rabbits, or chickens have been boiled, it may be stewed with the flavouring ingredients, without any meat. Time, four hours to make the stock, three hours to make the soup. Sufficient for ten or twelve persons.
A Victorian purée soup built on the carcass of a leftover bird, thickened with a bread panada rather than flour. It rewards a blender and very little else in the way of updating.
- The hinge: dry the breadThe soaked crumb must be wrung in a cloth until genuinely dry before it meets the pounded turkey. Wet panada makes a slack, pasty soup that no amount of reduction will save.
- Pounding, then and nowWhere the original wants a mortar and a sieve, a blender does the whole job in a minute. Purée the minced meat with the squeezed panada and a ladle of stock, then let it down with the rest and pass it through a fine strainer to catch sinew.
- Imperial measuresThis is a British book, so a pint is 20 fl oz, which is roughly 2.5 US cups, and two quarts is 80 fl oz, or a little under 10 US cups. Five pints of water for the stock is roughly 12 US cups.
- White stockThe veal stock given here is a classic fond blanc: bones and aromatics, no browning, no tomato. A good unsalted chicken stock stands in perfectly well; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which will muddy the colour the recipe is aiming for.
- Scrag-end and knuckleThe scrag end is the bony neck of a carcass; the recipe specifies veal, though the term is more often met with lamb or mutton. It is easier to find at a butcher than on a supermarket shelf. Veal knuckle, chicken wings or a split calf's foot will all contribute gelatine, the foot most of all.
- Cayenne, not black pepperCayenne is what Victorian cookery books commonly call for in white soups and sauces, the usual explanation being that it does not leave black specks. A pinch at a time; the soup should carry warmth, not heat.
- Finishing with creamAdd the hot cream or milk off the boil and serve at once. Once the dairy is in, a hard boil will split the soup, and the arrowroot thickening is best done before that point as the text directs.
- YieldThe recipe gives ten to twelve, which suits a first-course serving. As a main course with bread it will feed about six.
Cassell's places this among a family of white pur— among a family of white purée soups familiar on English dinner tables in the second half of the nineteenth century, the sort of dish a household cook produced from Monday's cold bird after Sunday's roast. The technique of thickening with soaked, squeezed bread rather than flour is older than roux-based cookery in English kitchens and descends from the medieval and early modern panada; it gives body without the raw taste of underworked flour, and it survives today mainly in bread sauce, gazpacho and meatball mixtures. The insistence that the soup be "of the consistency of thick cream" reflects a period preoccupation with texture in purées, at a time when passing everything through a hair sieve by hand was one of the most laborious jobs in a professional kitchen.