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Parsnip Soup
Melt 4 ounces butter in wide saucepan, and slice in 2 pounds tender parsnips; cook slowly till tender, then cover them well with any well-seasoned stock or broth, and boil for twenty minutes; press through sieve with wooden spoon, add enough stock to make 2 quarts in all, season with salt and white or cayenne pepper, let it boil up once. Skim--serve--eat!
A simple sweating-and-sieving puree of the kind that filled the puree pages of turn-of-the-century soup chapters. The whole character depends on cooking the parsnips gently in butter without letting them brown.
- The hinge: sweat, don't fryFour ounces of butter over 2 lb of parsnip is a lot of fat, and it is there to sweat the slices to sweetness, not to colour them. Keep the pan on low with a lid ajar; browned parsnip turns the finished soup muddy and slightly bitter.
- Butter quantityFour ounces is one US stick, 115 g. It is generous by modern taste and can be cut to 2 oz without harming the texture, since the body comes from the sieved parsnip rather than the fat.
- Parsnips, then and now"Tender" means young and thin. Large modern supermarket parsnips carry a woody core that will not break down; quarter them lengthwise and cut the core out before slicing, or the sieve will simply catch it.
- Sieve or blenderPressing through a sieve with a wooden spoon gives a very smooth result and removes fibre. A blender or stick blender does the work in seconds, though for the original silky texture pass the blended soup through a fine strainer afterwards.
- Stock quantityTwo quarts is 8 cups or about 1.9 litres of finished soup. Expect to add roughly a quart of stock at the covering stage and the rest after sieving, depending on how far the first lot reduces.
- The twenty-minute boilOnce the parsnips are already tender from the butter, twenty minutes at a boil is only there to marry them with the stock. A gentle simmer for ten to fifteen minutes is enough and keeps the flavour fresher.
- SeasoningWhite pepper is usually chosen for pale soups so that no dark flecks show; the recipe offers cayenne as the alternative, for a little heat. Parsnip's sweetness will carry a fair amount of salt, and the final boil-up is the moment to correct it.
- YieldTwo quarts serves six to eight as a first course. It thickens noticeably on standing and on reheating, so keep a little extra stock back.