Home › The Principles of Cookery › Vegetables, Dried, for Julienne and Clear Soups
Vegetables, Dried, for Julienne and Clear Soups
As vegetables for soup are rather troublesome to cut, especially for those unaccustomed to the work, and as fresh choice vegetables are not always to be had, the cook will find it both convenient and economical to have at hand a small quantity of dried vegetables, which may be bought at various foreign warehouses. These vegetables are light in weight, and in appearance something like chips. They need only to be soaked in cold water for three-quarters of an hour, then put into a saucepan over the fire, still in cold water slightly salted, and boiled like fresh vegetables. The clear soup should then be poured over them, and the whole boiled together for a quarter of an hour. They will have the flavour and appearance of fresh turned vegetables. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. per pound. Sufficient, a table-spoonful of dried vegetables for a quart of soup.
A method rather than a dish: how to reconstitute commercial dried vegetables so they behave like freshly cut ones in a clear soup. The product is still sold, usually as "soup greens", "julienne vegetable mix" or freeze-dried mirepoix.
- What the "chips" wereAir-dried strips of root and stem vegetables, of the kind typically sold loose by weight by importers of continental goods; the recipe itself specifies only "various foreign warehouses" and a price per pound. Modern dried or freeze-dried mixes work the same way, though freeze-dried pieces rehydrate faster and can generally be dropped straight into simmering stock.
- The soak matters more than the boilThree-quarters of an hour in cold water is what lets the pieces swell evenly. Skipped or shortened, the denser pieces such as carrot and turnip are apt to stay firm at the core.
- Cook in the water, not the soupThe first boil is in fresh cold water, lightly salted; the clear soup is only poured over the vegetables afterwards, which implies the cooking water is drained off rather than carried into the soup.
- The final quarter hourFifteen minutes in the soup is a long time for pieces already boiled tender; a shorter simmer may be enough to marry the flavours, since prolonged cooking will soften the julienne.
- "Turned" vegetablesTurning means paring fresh vegetables into small uniform barrel or baton shapes with a knife -- the fiddly work the recipe opens by complaining about. The claim here is that dried julienne saves that labour, not that it improves on it.
- QuantitiesA tablespoon of dried mix per quart of soup is a garnish, not a vegetable soup; expect a scattering in each bowl. Dried vegetables swell considerably on soaking, but if you want the julienne to read as a component you will need to increase the quantity.
- Cost1s. 6d. per pound for a store-cupboard item; the book itself calls the practice "both convenient and economical", and offers it to households that cannot always get fresh choice vegetables.
Julienne soup -- clear broth garnished with matchsticks of root vegetable -- was a fixture of nineteenth-century dinner service, and cutting the garnish evenly by hand was slow work. Dried soup vegetables reached British cooks through the "foreign warehouses" mentioned here, the import grocers who supplied continental goods; commercial vegetable drying is generally said to have grown in France and Germany during the nineteenth century, with army provisioning among the drivers, since dried rations kept well and travelled light. The entry is addressed to the household without a large staff: the same soup, minus much of the knife work, at the price of buying rather than growing.