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Vegetable Soup, with Meat
Take cabbage lettuces, chervil, white beet-leaves, celery, leeks, sorrel, and scraped carrot--a good handful of each. Chop these fine, and add cucumbers sliced, young peas, or asparagus. Stew gently in gravy and a few ounces of butter till they become quite tender, then put to them the required quantity of gravy or good broth made of shank of beef or veal and mutton. Give a boil, and serve up hot.
A soup built entirely on the proportion "a good handful of each," which is workable once you know the greens and how long they actually want in the pan. The hinge is the initial slow stew in butter and a little gravy: it should sweat, not fry, and not boil.
- Quantities"A good handful" of seven vegetables comes to perhaps 2 to 3 lb of trimmed greens and roots, which will collapse to a fraction of that. The original leaves the liquid to the cook ("the required quantity"); around 2 to 2 1/2 quarts will give 6 to 8 servings.
- Cabbage lettucesThe firm heading types, i.e. butterhead and its kin, not loose-leaf salad greens, which will dissolve to nothing. Cos (romaine) was generally reckoned a separate class from cabbage lettuce.
- White beet-leavesThe leaf and stalk of a white-stemmed beet or chard, used as a vegetable in its own right in the period. Swiss chard is the direct substitute; strip the leaves from the ribs and give the ribs a head start.
- Chervil and sorrelChervil loses its aniseed note quickly under heat, so it belongs in at the end rather than in the long stew. Sorrel turns olive-drab and sharply acidic — a small handful is a seasoning here, and it will curdle nothing but will dull the colour of the pot.
- "Gravy" is not thickened sauceIn period usage gravy generally means a clear, strong meat stock rather than a flour-bound sauce. Use unsalted beef or veal stock; the shank-and-mutton broth described is essentially a gelatinous brown stock, and a mix of beef shank with a little lamb shoulder gives a similar character.
- Butter and the sweatA few ounces is about 3 to 4 oz, roughly 6 to 8 tablespoons for this volume. Keep the heat low with the lid ajar for 15 to 20 minutes until the roots and stalks are tender; the vegetables should give up their liquid rather than colour.
- Peas, asparagus, cucumberThe original adds these with the rest, before the stew. If you want them to keep their texture, hold them back instead: sliced cucumber about 5 minutes, peas and cut asparagus 3 to 4, added after the stock goes in.
- "Give a boil"One brief return to the boil to marry stock and vegetables, then off. A long simmer at this stage flattens the leeks and celery into a uniform grey sweetness and kills the point of the dish.
- SeasoningThe original assumes a well-seasoned household stock and names no salt or pepper. Taste at the end; sorrel already supplies acid, so salt and white pepper are usually all it wants.
This is a household version of the French potage aux herbes or julienne tradition, in which a bundle of garden greens and roots is sweated in butter before stock is added. The ingredient list reads as a kitchen-garden inventory for late spring: lettuce heads, chervil, sorrel, beet tops, the first peas and asparagus. The list also shows how much narrower the English vegetable repertoire has since become; chervil and sorrel were ordinary garden plants in the nineteenth century and are now specialist buys, while white beet grown for its leaves has largely been displaced by chard, essentially the same plant under a different name. The distinction the recipe draws between "gravy" and "good broth" is worth noting: to a Victorian cook gravy meant the strong meat essence drawn from bones and trimmings, and the shank of beef or veal was chosen precisely because its gelatine gave the finished soup body without flour.