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VEGETABLE MARROW SOUP (another way) (Take two pounds of vegetable)
Take two pounds of vegetable marrow peeled and cut into dice about an inch square, put it into a pan with three ounces of salt butter or fat, two tea-spoonfuls of sugar, the same of salt, a little pepper, and half a pint of water. Stew gently until it is quite soft. When in a pulp stir in well two table-spoonfuls of flour; then add three pints of new milk, or two pints of milk and one of cream, or three pints of stock--but do not mix the stock and milk. Boil for ten minutes, and serve with fried toast cut into small squares.
A Victorian squash soup that works well once you know what vegetable marrow is and how the imperial measures translate. The hinge is the flour: it goes into the hot pulp and must cook briefly before any liquid arrives, or the finished soup tastes pasty.
- Vegetable marrowA mature summer squash of the Cucurbita pepo group, essentially an overgrown courgette. Use large courgettes, yellow summer squash or pattypan; two pounds trimmed weight, seeds scooped out if the flesh is old and spongy.
- Imperial measuresCassell's is a British book, so a pint is 20 fl oz. Half a pint of water is 10 fl oz (1¼ US cups), and three pints of milk is 60 fl oz (about 7½ US cups, or 1.75 litres).
- Salt butterThree ounces (85 g) of salted butter. Because the recipe also calls for two teaspoons of salt, taste before adding all of it, especially if you are using a commercial stock.
- New milkSimply fresh whole milk, unskimmed and unsoured. The alternatives given -- all milk, milk with cream, or all stock -- are three different soups; the recipe insists the stock and milk not be mixed, though it does not say why.
- Stewing the marrowCover the pan and keep the heat low. Watery squash collapses in 15-20 minutes; if liquid remains when the flesh is soft, boil it off so the flour has something to bind.
- The flourStir it into the hot pulp, then add the milk gradually. The recipe says to boil for ten minutes; a gentler simmer, stirred, will reduce the risk of a thin milk soup catching on the bottom of the pan.
- TextureThe recipe does not call for sieving, though many purée soups of the period were passed through a sieve. A stick blender does the same in seconds, and the soup is also good left rough.
- Fried toastCroûtons -- small squares of bread fried in butter or dripping, drained, and scattered on at the table so they stay crisp.
- YieldSomething over four pints of finished soup, enough for eight or more as a first course.
Vegetable marrow was a Victorian kitchen-garden staple rather than a market vegetable: a New World squash, grown in British gardens through the nineteenth century and usually left on the plant until it swelled, which is why so many old recipes begin by peeling and dicing something large and bland. The name is often said to refer to the soft, marrow-like pulp of the cooked flesh rather than to bone marrow, though the derivation is traditional rather than certain. Cassell's, compiled in the 1870s and expanded for decades afterwards, offers several treatments of it -- soup, stewed in butter, stuffed, or in a sweet pudding. The structure here, vegetables sweated in butter, thickened with flour and let down with milk, is the standard Victorian purée soup and the direct ancestor of the cream-of-vegetable soups that later went into tins.