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Vegetable Soup, Vegetable Strips For
Cut the carrots into pieces an inch long, and pare these round and round in thin ribands till the yellow part is reached. Cut these ribands into small strips, and the carrots will be ready for the soup. Turnips also may be pared into ribands and cut into strips, and celery may be cut into thin narrow straws. The vegetables should be boiled separately in stock or water until almost tender, and then drained and thrown into the soup. If boiled entirely in the soup, they will, in all probability, make it look cloudy.
This is a preparation note rather than a full recipe — the method for cutting and pre-cooking the vegetable garnish that turns plain stock into vegetable soup. A few of its assumptions no longer hold.
- The "yellow part" of the carrotOlder carrot varieties commonly had a paler, tougher inner core, and the instruction is to pare only the deep orange outer flesh. Modern varieties are generally more uniform in colour and tender through the core, so in practice there is little to pare down to — cut strips from the whole root and stop when you run out of carrot.
- What the cut actually isParing round and round in thin ribbons and then slicing the ribbons is a hand method of arriving at what would now be called julienne. Aim for pieces about 1 inch long and 1/16 inch thick; a mandoline or a steady knife gets there faster than a peeler.
- The point that mattersBoil each vegetable separately and only until almost tender, then drain before adding to the soup. Fine debris shed by carrot and turnip during a long simmer is what clouds a clear soup, and clearing it again is far more trouble than avoiding it.
- Timing for blanchingIn salted water at a rolling boil, carrot strips of this size need about 2-3 minutes, turnip 2 minutes, celery straws barely 1. Refresh in cold water if the soup will not be served immediately, or they will overcook in their own heat.
- Stock or waterBlanching in stock gives more flavour but leaves you with diluted, cloudy stock you then have to use for something. Water is the practical choice unless you are making the garnish and the soup from the same batch.
- QuantityNo amounts are given because this is a technique note. As a guide, one medium carrot, half a small turnip and one celery stalk cut this way garnish about six bowls of clear soup.
- Use the trimmingsParing ribbons from a carrot produces an awkward stub and a pile of offcuts. They go into the stockpot rather than the bin.
This belongs to a school of cooking in which the appearance of a clear soup was a test of the kitchen's competence, and the fine vegetable garnish — cut by hand, cooked apart, added at the last moment — was a standard finish, of the kind later codified in French professional kitchens under names such as julienne. The instruction to pare a carrot only as far as the "yellow part" reflects a piece of horticultural history: the orange carrot familiar today is usually traced to Dutch selection work in the seventeenth century, and nineteenth-century market carrots often still had a paler, more fibrous core that cooks pared away. Later breeding has largely removed that step.