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VEGETABLE MARROW SOUP (another way) (Boil five or six small)
Boil five or six small vegetable marrows, peeled and each cut into eight pieces, in a quart of good rich veal stock; put them into the boiling stock, and simmer gently three-quarters of an hour. Then beat the pulp through a sieve, and return it with an additional pint of stock, to be made hot together. Season with pepper and salt, and, just before serving the soup, stir in a breakfast-cupful of cream, which should be first made quite hot. Time, one hour. Sufficient for seven or eight persons.
A plain purée soup that depends entirely on the stock and the cream, since marrow itself contributes little more than body and a faint sweetness. Two things decide the result: seasoning, and not letting the cream boil.
- What a vegetable marrow isMarrow and courgette (zucchini) are the same species, the courgette being picked immature, though marrows are usually grown from distinct cultivars rather than being overgrown courgettes. Five or six small ones probably means fruits of perhaps 6-8 inches rather than the football-sized specimens left on the plant -- on the order of 2 to 2 1/2 lb of trimmed flesh. Courgettes work directly, though the flavour is slightly greener.
- Seeds and skinThe recipe says peeled but says nothing about seeds. Anything larger than a courgette will have a spongy seeded core that should be scooped out, or the purée turns watery and stringy.
- MeasuresA quart is 40 fl oz in the imperial measure of this book (32 fl oz US), a pint 20 fl oz (16 US). A breakfast-cupful is roughly 8 to 10 fl oz. Total liquid comes to around three pints plus the cream.
- Veal stockA light, gelatinous, barely-coloured stock. A good unsalted chicken stock is the nearest supermarket equivalent; a vegetable stock will make the soup taste thin, as marrow brings almost no savour of its own.
- The sieve"Beat the pulp through a sieve" is the Victorian purée method. A blender does it in seconds, but pass the result through a fine sieve afterwards if you want the silky texture the original is aiming at.
- The creamHeat it separately, as directed, and stir it in at the last moment; keeping it off the boil is safest. Cream stirred into a hot salted purée and then boiled can break, and reheating the finished soup hard will spoil it.
- Cooking timeThree-quarters of an hour is longer than marrow needs to soften; 15 to 20 minutes at a gentle simmer will have it collapsing. The longer simmer also concentrates the stock, so taste as you go and add the second pint only until the soup is the thickness you want.
- Seasoning and yieldPepper and salt alone may taste bland by current tastes; a grating of nutmeg or a squeeze of lemon at the end lifts it. Three pints plus the cream across seven or eight people works out at roughly 8 to 9 fl oz each.
Cassell's gives marrow soup more than one entry because the marrow was, in late nineteenth-century Britain, the vegetable a household could not avoid: a single plant in a kitchen garden or allotment produced more fruit than any family could eat, and it kept for weeks in a cool shed. Puréed soups of this kind — vegetable simmered in meat stock, sieved, finished with hot cream — were the standard treatment for almost any garden produce in the period, and the same formula recurs across these books under other vegetables. The reliance on veal stock is characteristic of Victorian professional practice, where veal bones gave a neutral, gelatinous base that carried flavour without imposing one; it fell out of domestic use in the twentieth century as veal grew expensive and chicken stock took its place. The origin of the name marrow for the vegetable is uncertain, though it is often said to rest on an analogy with the soft flesh of bone marrow.