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Vegetable Soup, Summer
Take a good quantity of mixed summer vegetables, such as green peas, lettuces, young onions, turnips and carrots, sorrel and leeks, to which may be added a small bunch of chervil and parsley, a cucumber, etc. Chop the roots into small pieces, and slice the bulbs thinly. Supposing there to be a pint of mixed vegetables, put them into a stewpan with a slice of fresh butter, and turn them about with a wooden spoon till they begin to soften, being careful that they are not allowed either to brown or to burn. Pour upon them a quart of veal stock, and season with salt and cayenne and a very small quantity of grated nutmeg. Skim the soup, and simmer gently till the vegetables are all perfectly tender. Stir into it half a pint of boiling cream, and serve with the vegetables in the tureen. If cream cannot be had, a little milk and the yolk of an egg may be used instead. Boil half a pint of milk, and pour it through a strainer into the soup. When the soup is to be served make the tureen quite hot, and throw into it the yolk of an egg. Beat this briskly with a table-spoonful of the soup out of the saucepan; add to it, gradually, six additional spoonfuls. Pour in the remainder of the soup, which should not be quite at the point of boiling, though thoroughly hot. Serve immediately. Time, one hour and a half. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A French-style spring and summer vegetable potage, thickened at the end with cream or an egg liaison. Two things decide whether it works: the vegetables must sweat in butter without colouring, and the finish must never boil.
- The liaison is the hingeIf you use the egg-yolk version, the soup must be hot but below simmering when it meets the yolk, and it must not go back on the heat afterwards. The tempering described here — one spoonful of soup beaten in, then six more — exists precisely to stop the yolk scrambling into threads.
- Imperial measuresThese are British pints of 20 fl oz. A pint of mixed vegetables is about 2 1/2 cups prepared; a quart of stock is 5 cups; half a pint of cream is 1 1/4 cups.
- Ignore the hour and a halfThe stated hour and a half may cover preparation as well as cooking, and is longer than the vegetables need. Sweating takes 8–10 minutes, and once the stock is in, 20–25 minutes brings diced root vegetables to tenderness. Peas, lettuce and sorrel want only the last five.
- Sorrel and lettuceSorrel collapses almost instantly and turns olive-drab; shred it and add it at the very end. Shredded cos or romaine behaves the same way. A handful of each is plenty — sorrel is aggressively acidic and too much will curdle cream.
- Veal stockA pale veal stock is the point here: neutral, faintly gelatinous, no brown colour. A light unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute. Anything roasted or beef-based will fight the delicate vegetables.
- StewpanA stewpan is a straight-sided saucepan with a lid, not a casserole dish. Use a heavy 3-quart pan so the butter and vegetables do not catch.
- SeasoningCayenne rather than pepper, and nutmeg in a genuinely small quantity — the recipe specifies 'a very small quantity' of nutmeg, a scrape or two. The cayenne quantity is left to the cook.
- ServingThe recipe gives five or six portions and asks that the vegetables be left in, not sieved out. Warming the tureen matters more than usual, since the finished soup is never reheated.
This is a Victorian rendering of the French potage printanier family a light stock loaded with young vegetables and bound with cream or egg yolks rather than flour. The vegetable list is a period fingerprint: sorrel and chervil were standard kitchen-garden crops in nineteenth-century Britain, though both largely disappeared from British greengrocers in the twentieth century. So did the assumption of a pale veal stock always on hand, which is what allows a soup this delicate to have any body at all. The alternative egg-yolk finish, offered for households that could not get cream, is the classical liaison, and the recipe gives elaborate tempering instructions.