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Thick Vegetable Soup
1 qt. sediment 1 qt. boiling water Turnip, Carrot, Onion} 1/2 cup each, diced Celery, Cabbage, Potatoes} 1 cup each, diced 1/4 cup cooked pearl barley Few grains pepper 1 teaspoon salt Scald turnips, onions, carrots and cabbage in boiling water. Cook in 1 quart boiling salt water for thirty minutes. Add 1 quart of sediment left from clear soup, potatoes, celery, pearl barley, and more salt if needed. Let simmer until vegetables are tender.
Tomato Soup, with Stock 6 tomatoes, or 1 qt. canned tomatoes 1 onion 2 cloves 6 peppercorns Bit of celery root, or 1/2 teaspoon celery seed 1 tablespoon Gold Medal flour, 1 tablespoon butter} for every quart of soup Take bones and trimmings from roast beef and any other scraps of meat or bone. Put in kettle and cover with cold water, twice as much water as meat. Add seasonings and cook for four hours. Skim off fat, add tomatoes, and cook thirty minutes. Skim out bones and meat and strain liquor through a puree strainer, rubbing all tomato pulp through. Heat and thicken with Gold Medal flour, cooked in the butter.
Two economy soups built on what is left over from other cooking. The first will make no sense at all until you know what "sediment" means here.
- "Sediment" is not siltIt means the cloudy dregs and settled solids left in the pot after a clear soup or consomme has been strained off — meat particles, vegetable shreds, egg-white raft debris and the murky liquid they sit in. If you have not just made consomme, substitute a quart of ordinary beef or chicken stock; the soup will be cleaner-tasting but no worse.
- Scald, then cookThe recipe scalds turnip, onion, carrot and cabbage in boiling water before cooking them thirty minutes in boiling salted water. It does not say what becomes of the scalding water; the ingredient list mentions only one quart, so whether the simmer starts in fresh water is left to the cook.
- Barley must already be cookedThe quarter cup of pearl barley goes in cooked. Raw barley added at that stage will still be chalky when the potatoes have collapsed. Simmer it separately in water until tender, about 35 to 40 minutes, and drain.
- Watch the potatoes, not the clock"Simmer until vegetables are tender" is about 15 to 20 minutes once the potatoes and celery go in. The already-cooked root vegetables will go to mush if you push much beyond that.
- YieldTwo quarts of liquid plus roughly a quart of diced vegetables gives four to six generous bowls. Neither recipe states this.
- Tomato soup: the stock is the recipeFour hours of bones, trimmings and cold water at a bare simmer is the whole foundation. Cold water at the start, no rolling boil, and skim the fat off before the tomatoes go in — fat emulsified into an acidic soup tastes greasy.
- Whole spices, then strainThe cloves and peppercorns go in whole and are removed with the bones. A puree strainer means a conical sieve worked with a ladle or pestle; a food mill or fine mesh sieve does the same job of pushing tomato pulp through while holding back skin and seed.
- Celery root or celery seed"Bit of celery root" means celeriac; the recipe leaves the quantity to the cook. Half a teaspoon of celery seed is the stated equivalent and is much easier to find, but it is more assertive — add it to the stock, not at the end.
- The thickeningOne tablespoon each flour and butter per quart is a thin blond roux, a lighter binding than a cream soup. Cook the flour in the butter two or three minutes before adding hot soup to it, whisking, or the flour will set into lumps.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was promotional literature from the Washburn-Crosby Company of Minneapolis, the mill behind the Gold Medal brand and later a constituent of General Mills — which explains why flour appears by brand name even in a soup thickened with a single tablespoon of it. Both recipes here belong to a genre of household cookery that has largely disappeared: soup made from the by-products of other soup. Clarifying a consomme with egg white leaves a quart of murky, well-flavoured dregs in the bottom of the kettle, and a thrifty kitchen did not pour that away. The same logic governs the tomato soup, which begins not with a shopping list but with "bones and trimmings from roast beef and any other scraps." Pearl barley in the thick soup points the same direction — a cheap, filling grain long standard in northern European and Scottish broths, and a way to stretch a pot without adding cost.