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Winter Soup, Clear
A short time before it is wanted, clarify some stock made from fresh meat (see CLEAR SOUP). Cut the red part of two large carrots and a turnip into quarter-inch dice. Divide two white stalks of celery into shreds, and skin a dozen button onions. Half boil the vegetables in salted water to which a little sugar has been added. Drain them, and put them into a stewpan with about three pints of the clear stock, boiling. Let them simmer till tender, and serve.
A clear vegetable garnish soup that lives or dies on the clarity of the stock: everything else is knife work and restraint.
- Keep the stock clearThe vegetables are par-boiled separately and drained precisely so no starch or scum clouds the consommé. Do not shortcut this by cooking them straight in the stock.
- "The red part" of the carrotVictorian carrots had a paler, woodier core that was discarded; modern varieties are uniform, so simply trim away any tough centre if present. Cut a true quarter-inch dice so the pieces cook evenly and look deliberate in the bowl.
- Button onionsUse pearl or small pickling onions, about 1 inch across. A brief soak in boiling water loosens the skins; leave them whole and trim the root flat so they hold shape.
- The sugar in the blanching waterThe recipe says only "a little"; a pinch is enough. It presumably takes the edge off the turnip rather than sweetening the soup.
- Quantities and yieldThree pints is about 1.7 litres, serving six as a first course. Season the stock, not the finished soup, so you do not have to stir at the end.
- TimingsPar-boil the diced root vegetables 4-5 minutes, the celery shreds 2, the onions 6-8; then 8-10 minutes' gentle simmer in the stock to finish. "Till tender" in a clear soup means yielding but still holding its edges, not collapsing.
- Simmer, do not boilA rolling boil will break the vegetables and turn a clarified stock hazy. Keep the surface barely trembling and skim any fat with a strip of kitchen paper before serving.
- StockThe recipe calls for stock made from fresh meat, clarified by whatever method the book's CLEAR SOUP entry gives; egg-white clearing was the usual Victorian route. A good unsalted commercial stock, reduced slightly and strained through a coffee filter, gets close enough for a weeknight.
Clear soups of this kind were the Victorian and Edwardian dinner's formal opening, and the cook's competence was judged on them: a consommé that was cloudy or greasy reflected badly on the whole table. What distinguished one clear soup from another was largely the garnish, which is why nineteenth-century cookery books carry many near-identical entries differing chiefly in what is cut into the broth — julienne, brunoise, printanière, and here a winter set of keeping vegetables. The name looks literal rather than poetic: carrots, turnip, celery and small onions were the sort of thing a root cellar still held in winter, when the spring garnishes of peas and young beans were out of the question.