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Legume and Vegetable Soup
1/4 cup dry Lima beans 2 tablespoons green split peas 1 cup chopped carrots 1 cup chopped cabbage 2 tablespoons chopped celery 1/4 cup chopped turnips 2 tablespoons okra (fresh or canned) 1 small onion, chopped 1/4 cup chopped parsley 2 quarts water 1/4 cup unroasted peanut butter or very finely chopped raw peanuts 1 tablespoon salt Instead of the raw peanuts or peanut butter, two tablespoons nut soup stock or one tablespoon vegex may be used. If these are used, the beans and peas may be omitted.
Wash the beans and peas and put them to cook in the cold water. Prepare the vegetables and put them, except the parsley, to cook with the peas and beans. Boil slowly five hours. At the end of four hours' cooking add the chopped peanuts or the peanut butter thinned with hot water. After another hour's cooking add the salt, chopped parsley, and boiling water to replace what has boiled away. Serve with croutons.
A plain vegetarian pot soup that builds its body from legumes and ground peanuts rather than meat stock. Nothing here is difficult; the main adjustments are the cooking time and two ingredients that have left the shelves.
- The five-hour boilDried lima beans and green split peas are done in 45 to 90 minutes, and the chopped root vegetables collapse well before that. Simmer covered until the beans are tender, then add the vegetables for the last 30 minutes; the recipe itself concedes that the long boil drives off liquid, since it has you add boiling water at the end to replace what has gone.
- VegexA concentrated brewer's-yeast extract sold to vegetarian households of the period as a meat-free savoury base. Any yeast extract of the Marmite or Vegemite type does the same job in the same quantity, though start with less and taste, as it carries a great deal of salt.
- Unroasted peanut butterUnroasted nut butters were called for in health-reform cookery of this kind, and raw peanut butter is now a specialty item. Ordinary unsweetened roasted peanut butter works, giving a darker, toastier soup; thin it with hot broth to a pourable cream before stirring in, or it will sit in lumps.
- SaltA tablespoon into two quarts is around 18 g, and it goes in at the very end. Add half, taste, and adjust, especially if you have used yeast extract or nut stock in place of the peanuts.
- OkraTwo tablespoons is a thickener, not a vegetable presence. Cut it small and add it with the other vegetables; if you dislike the viscosity it contributes, leave it out and the soup simply comes out thinner.
- Nut soup stockA period preparation made by simmering ground nuts and straining the milky liquid. There is no direct commercial equivalent; unsweetened almond or cashew milk is the closest stand-in, though it lacks the salt and savour.
- Yield and servingThe recipe tops the pot back up at the end, so you finish with roughly two quarts, or about six generous bowls. Croutons are worth making rather than skipping, as the soup is soft-textured throughout and wants the contrast.
The ingredients here -- unroasted peanut butter, nut soup stock, Vegex -- are hallmarks of the vegetarian cookery associated with the health-reform movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which the problem of the day was how to give a soup the richness and satisfaction of a meat broth without meat. Both answers used here belong to that world: ground peanuts, promoted heavily as a protein food in this period, and Vegex, a yeast extract marketed to vegetarian households. That the recipe offers the reader a choice between them, and notes that with the yeast extract the beans and peas may be dropped altogether, shows a cook thinking in terms of nutritional substitution rather than tradition.