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Good Vegetable Soup
Get a good soup bone, wash well and cover with water and let simmer five hours. Let it get cold and skim off the fat. Put back on stove, add one-half can of tomatoes, four chopped onions, small sprig of parsley, three pieces of celery, one-half small head of cabbage (chopped), one carrot. Keep adding water from time to time as it boils away. Put in one small cup of rice, salt, black pepper, one tablespoon of sugar, four white cloves. Cook slowly a long time.
— Mrs. F. P. Bush
A two-day soup in its original form: broth simmered and chilled one day, vegetables added the next. Nothing here is difficult, but a few of the quantities need translating.
- The soup boneA butcher's "soup bone" was usually a marrow or shank bone with some meat still attached. Beef shank cross-cuts or oxtail give the same result; a bare marrow bone alone will not, since the body of the broth came from the meat and connective tissue.
- Five hours, then coldThe chilling step is not optional flavour lore. It sets the fat into a cap you can lift off in one piece, which is far more effective than skimming a hot pot. Refrigerate overnight and lift the fat before reheating.
- Half a can of tomatoesCanned tomatoes of the period came in several sizes, commonly around 20 oz or larger, so half a can is somewhere between one and one and a half cups of tomatoes with their juice. Half of a modern 14.5 oz can is close enough.
- Four white clovesGenuinely ambiguous. Whole clove spice is the most likely reading, and four is a sensible number for a large pot; some readers take "cloves" here as garlic. If you use the spice, tie them in cloth so they can be fished out.
- The riceA small cup of raw rice will keep swelling and will drink the broth as the soup stands, turning leftovers into porridge. Either accept a very thick soup, as intended, or cook the rice separately and add it to each bowl.
- "Keep adding water"The instruction assumes a pot on the back of a range all afternoon. On a modern burner, a bare simmer with the lid ajar for 45 minutes to an hour is enough to soften the cabbage and carrot; top up only if the level drops below the vegetables.
- The spoon of sugarIt is there to balance the acidity of the canned tomatoes. Add it at the end and taste first; you may want less.
- YieldWith a shank bone and this quantity of vegetables and rice, about 3 quarts, or six to eight bowls as a main course.
Community cookbooks like this one were sold to raise money for a church, library or hospital, and their recipes are dishes named after the women who submitted them, written for neighbours who already knew how a kitchen worked. A soup bone was the cheapest thing at the butcher's counter. The half can of tomatoes is the tell for the period: commercially canned tomatoes were by then widely available, and a household that would have grown its own cabbage, carrots, onions and parsley thought nothing of reaching for tinned tomatoes in the same pot.