Turkish Soup
5 cups Brown Soup Stock 1/4 cup rice 1 1/2 cups stewed and strained tomatoes Bit of bay leaf 2 slices onion 10 peppercorns 1/4 teaspoon celery salt 2 tablespoons butter 1 1/2 tablespoons flour Cook rice in Brown Stock until soft. Cook bay leaf, onion, peppercorns, and celery salt with tomatoes thirty minutes. Combine mixtures, rub through sieve, and bind with butter and flour cooked together. Season with salt and pepper if needed.
A thickened tomato-and-rice puree built on beef stock, of the type that filled the soup chapter of nearly every American cookbook around 1900. It comes together in under an hour if the stock is already made.
- Brown stockThis means beef bones and trimmings browned in the oven or pan before simmering, giving a dark, deeply savoury liquid. A good unsalted beef stock is the closest substitute; season only at the end, since the roux and the reduction concentrate whatever salt is present.
- Stewed and strained tomatoesIn 1900 this meant tomatoes cooked down and pushed through a sieve to remove skin and seed. Canned crushed tomatoes or passata work directly; 1 1/2 cups is roughly one 14-oz can once reduced.
- The rice does the workCooked soft in the stock and then sieved, the rice is a thickener as much as a garnish. Give it 25 to 30 minutes so the grains collapse readily; underdone rice will not pass through a sieve and leaves a gritty soup.
- SievingA food mill or a blender followed by a fine strainer replaces the wire sieve and rubs less skin off your knuckles. Blending alone leaves tomato seed fragments, so a final strain is worth the trouble.
- Binding with butter and flourCook the 2 tablespoons butter with 1 1/2 tablespoons flour for a minute or two until it smells nutty but stays pale, then whisk in a ladle of the hot soup before returning it all to the pot. Simmer three or four minutes to lose the raw flour taste.
- Peppercorns and bayBoth are steeped in the tomato and then removed by the sieve. If you are using a blender, fish out the bay and the peppercorns first or you will get harsh black specks throughout.
- Celery saltStill sold, but modern brands vary in salt content. Hold back any additional salt until after the final simmer.
- YieldSomething under 6 cups once evaporation from the simmering is allowed for, or four generous first-course servings.
Nineteenth-century cookbooks attached "Turkish" to a great many dishes with only a loose claim to Turkey, usually meaning rice, tomato, or a warm spice note that struck the writer as eastern. What is here is a tomato soup thickened with rice and bound with a butter-flour roux, and it belongs to a period when the American soup chapter was organised around a household stockpot, one brown stock serving as the base for a range of different soups.