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VEGETABLE SOUP (another way)
Put one onion cut in pieces into a saucepan with three ounces of butter, and brown it; then add finely-shredded turnips, parsnips, leeks, carrots (also a white carrot, if procurable), green celery, a little sorrel, one small potato, and a few French beans and green peas, all of which are to be tossed and browned in the butter, with sufficient quantities of salt and pepper. Put in a little water or stock, crush the vegetables slightly, then fill up with more water, and let the soup simmer for two hours. A little rice or pearl barley may with advantage be added to the vegetables. Care must be taken not to get the soup of too thick a consistency.
A brown vegetable soup built on the French model: the vegetables are caramelised in butter before any liquid goes in, which is where all the colour and depth comes from. The original gives no quantities for the vegetables and no yield, so treat it as a method rather than a formula.
- The hinge is the browningThe onion and root vegetables must take real colour in the butter before liquid is added — twenty minutes or more over medium heat, stirring often. Rush this and the soup is pale and thin-tasting, and no amount of simmering will fix it.
- QuantitiesNone are given beyond the onion, the butter and the single small potato. About 2 lb of mixed vegetables to 3 oz butter and 2 quarts of water or stock is a sensible reading, serving six to eight.
- "A white carrot, if procurable"Probably one of the pale carrot varieties then grown in market gardens, such as the White Belgian; the term was used loosely in the period and is a specialty item now. A parsnip is already on the list, so simply leave it out; nothing is lost.
- French beans and green peasFrench beans are green beans, topped and cut short. Both these and the peas will be completely spent after two hours — add them in the last ten minutes if you want any texture or colour from them.
- SorrelSorrel supplies the acidity that keeps a two-hour vegetable soup from tasting flat. It collapses to a khaki purée almost immediately, which is expected. Without it, finish the soup with a squeeze of lemon.
- Green celeryIn this period celery was usually blanched pale under earth or boards; "green" celery means the ordinary unblanched stalks sold today, leaves included.
- Rice or pearl barleyThe recipe gives no quantity; a scant quarter-cup of either is enough. Barley in particular keeps swelling, which may well be behind the closing warning about consistency -- hold back some of the water and add it at the end if the soup tightens.
- Simmer, not boilTwo hours at a bare simmer with the lid ajar. A hard boil reduces the liquid too fast and breaks the roots into mush before the flavours have married.
This is a domestic version of the French potage of browned roots, the kitchen relative of the more elaborate julienne soups that Victorian cookery books borrowed wholesale from French professional practice — the distinguishing move being that the vegetables are fried in butter to colour rather than sweated pale. Cassell's, an alphabetical dictionary aimed at middle-class households, routinely printed two or three ways of making the same thing, and this "another way" is the frugal one: it wants no meat at all, only water if stock is unavailable, and it takes its body from the crushed vegetables themselves rather than from a roux, with a handful of rice or pearl barley offered as an optional addition. The vegetable list is essentially a British kitchen garden in high summer, which is also why it reads oddly to modern eyes — sorrel and white carrots were ordinary garden crops in the nineteenth century and have since largely disappeared from commerce, a shift often attributed to market gardening consolidating around a shorter list of varieties.