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Bouillon from Vegetable Paste
Dissolve a teaspoonful of the prepared paste in boiling water for every cup of bouillon required.
Add extra flavoring if desired, a few drops of onion extract, a little sherry flavoring, or a slice of lemon.
This is really a set of proportions for reconstituting a commercial bouillon concentrate, the kind sold in jars as a stiff brown paste. The instruction that matters is the ratio, and modern pastes are saltier than the ratio assumes.
- What the paste was"Prepared paste" means a concentrated vegetable or yeast-extract paste; it may be one prepared earlier in the book, or a jarred product of the sort sold as Vegex, Marmite or a modern vegetable base. A bouillon cube crushed into the cup is the same idea in drier form.
- Start under a teaspoonCurrent vegetable base pastes commonly run in the region of 500-800 mg sodium per teaspoon, and there is no telling how salty the paste behind this recipe was. Begin with half a teaspoon per cup of water, taste, and build up rather than trying to rescue an oversalted cup.
- Hot water, not boiling waterWater just off the boil dissolves the paste in a few seconds if you stir; the recipe's "boiling water" is about dissolving, not about keeping the cup at a boil. Prolonged boiling only concentrates the salt, and with yeast-extract pastes it may dull the aroma.
- Onion extractA bottled flavoring of the sort sold with the other extracts, and less commonly used today. A pinch of onion powder or a strip of onion steeped in the hot bouillon and lifted out gives the same effect.
- "Sherry flavoring"Almost certainly a non-alcoholic essence rather than wine; such extracts were sold as substitutes for wine in cookery in the Prohibition years and after. Half a teaspoon of actual dry sherry per cup does the job better if you have it.
- QuantityThe recipe scales by the cup. For a first course, figure a scant cup per person served in a two-handled bouillon cup or a small mug; it is meant to be sipped, not spooned.
- Where it sits in the menuAs the opening course it wants nothing more than the lemon slice or a few drops of extract. If you are serving it as a light lunch, a spoonful of cooked rice or fine noodles in the cup carries it further.
Bouillon paste belongs to the long nineteenth- and twentieth-century enthusiasm for meat and vegetable extracts — Liebig's beef extract, commercialised in the 1860s, Bovril after it, and then the yeast- and vegetable-based pastes that gave vegetarians and reducing dieters a savory hot drink without meat stock. Concentrates like these were marketed as much for health and convenience as for flavor, and hot bouillon before a meal turns up in diet writing of the period as a way of taking the edge off the appetite. The recipe's brevity is the point: what it asks is that the cup be dressed up a little — lemon, a drop of onion, a suggestion of sherry — so that something out of a jar arrives at the table looking deliberate.