Home › The Principles of Cookery › Turnip Soup
Turnip Soup
Wash and pare half a dozen turnips, and let them lie in cold water for a quarter of an hour. Drain them, and cut them up small. Put them into a stewpan with four ounces of fresh butter and three ounces of lean ham cut into dice, and stir them about over a gentle fire for two or three minutes. Add two or three onions and one or two sticks of celery, and pour over them a pint of stock made from bones. Let them simmer gently till they are quite soft, dredge two handfuls of flour over them, and beat them briskly with a wooden spoon till they are quite smooth. Moisten gradually with two pints of stock, and stir the soup over the fire till it boils. Rub it through a fine hair sieve, let it boil up again, add salt, pepper, and powdered mace, and half a pint of boiling cream, and it will be ready for serving. If liked, a bay-leaf and two or three cloves may be stewed with the other ingredients, and the flour may be omitted, and a little ground rice or arrowroot substituted for it. Send sippets of toast to table on a separate dish. Time, two hours and a half, exclusive of the stock. Sufficient for eight or nine persons. Probable cost, 4d. per pint. exclusive of the stock.
A straightforward velvet-textured vegetable soup, thickened with a roux made in the pan and finished with cream. Two details in the original need translating: the flour is measured by handful, and the sieving step is what makes the soup.
- Turnip quantityHalf a dozen turnips probably means small turnips, roughly the size of a golf ball to a plum — perhaps 1 to 1.5 lb trimmed. If you are using large winter turnips or swede, two will do, and expect a stronger, more sulphurous flavour.
- "Two handfuls of flour"Genuinely imprecise. Read it as 4 to 5 oz (about 1 cup) for the quantity of vegetables and 3 pints of stock here, added as a dredge so it cooks into the butter and vegetable liquid. If you prefer the alternative given, 2 to 3 tablespoons of arrowroot or ground rice slaked in cold stock will thicken the finished purée.
- The sieve is the pointA fine hair sieve was the standard tool for a smooth soup. A blender or food processor gets you most of the way, but pass it through a fine mesh sieve afterwards as well — turnip fibre and celery strings survive blending and are what separate this from a rough purée.
- Cream at the endThe original has you add boiling cream to soup that has already boiled up. Heat the cream separately and stir it in off the heat, or bring the soup only to a bare simmer after. Flour-thickened soup with cream in it catches on the pan base easily and scorching ruins the flavour.
- TimingTwo and a half hours is generous for what is happening. Small turnips simmer soft in 20 to 25 minutes; the whole soup can be done in about an hour, with most of that the initial sweating and the sieving. Long cooking does turnip no favours.
- Mace and the hamPowdered mace is the outer coat of nutmeg and is milder and more floral — a scant quarter teaspoon is enough. The lean ham is seasoning, not a garnish, so salt at the very end and taste first.
- SippetsSmall triangles or cubes of toast, sent separately so they stay crisp. Fried croutons do the same job.
- YieldRoughly 3.5 pints finished, serving eight or nine as a first course as stated, or four or five as a main-course bowl.
Turnips were the everyday winter root of English cookery long before the potato displaced them, and by the time Cassell's compiled this dictionary in the later nineteenth century they had acquired a slightly humble reputation — cheap, plentiful, and associated with cattle feed as much as with the dining room. The treatment here is the standard rescue operation of the period: sweat the root in butter with ham and aromatics, thicken, sieve to velvet, and finish with cream. The note of probable cost, fourpence per pint, is characteristic of the book and tells you the audience: a household keeping accounts, with a stockpot already going, for whom a soup that made six turnips feed nine people at table was worth writing down.