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Winter Julienne
1 qt. brown stock 1 pt. mixed vegetables. {celery, turnip, carrot, onion, cabbage 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 saltspoon peppercorns Cut celery and turnip into dice. Cut carrot into match shaped pieces, slice onion. Cabbage should be coarsely chopped. Cook the vegetables in boiling salted water until tender. Drain them and add to the soup a few minutes before serving. A richer soup may be had by retaining the vegetable stock.
A clear vegetable soup that depends entirely on the stock and on cutting the vegetables to a uniform size. The instructions are terse, so a few points need filling in.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Half a saltspoon of peppercorns is about an eighth of a teaspoon, or roughly six to eight whole corns.
- Brown stockBeef or veal bones roasted before simmering, giving a dark, clear broth. A good low-sodium beef stock stands in; taste before adding the half teaspoon of salt, since commercial stock is already seasoned.
- The cut is the dishJulienne means matchsticks, and the name is the recipe. Aim for pieces about 1/8 inch square and 1 1/2 inches long. The book's instruction to dice the celery and turnip is inconsistent with the name; cut everything to matchsticks if you want the classic result.
- Cook the vegetables in stagesA pint of mixed vegetables will not soften at the same rate. Carrot and turnip need 6 to 8 minutes, celery and onion 4, coarsely chopped cabbage 2 to 3. Boiling them together as written leaves the cabbage grey and collapsed.
- Whole peppercornsAdd them to the stock as it heats and strain them out, or crack them coarsely. Whole corns left in the bowl are unpleasant to bite.
- "Retaining the vegetable stock"Rather than draining the cooking water away, cook the vegetables in a small amount of water and pour the lot into the soup. It adds body and sweetness but slightly clouds the broth, which is presumably why the book treats it as the alternative rather than the default.
- YieldA quart of stock plus a pint of vegetables serves four as a first course.
Julienne soup takes its name from the knife cut, a term in French kitchen use since at least the eighteenth century and standard in English cookbooks by the late nineteenth. The point of a julienne was display: identical slender strips of vegetable suspended in a clear brown consomme, a small demonstration that the cook could handle a knife. The "winter" in the title appears to mark the vegetable list -- turnip, carrot, onion and cabbage are the roots and keepers that a household would still have in the cellar in February, when the spring julienne of peas, asparagus tips and young lettuce was months off.