English Soup
Two tablespoons of flour Two tablespoons of butter Two tablespoons of sugar One tablespoon of Larkin Table Salt One teaspoon of Larkin Extract of Beef One-fourth teaspoon of Larkin White Pepper One medium-sized onion Three pints of boiling water Chop onion and cook with sugar Blend flour and butter, and add the water in which Beef Extract has been dissolved. Add onion cooked, boil for five minutes and strain.
A brown onion soup thickened with a roux and built on commercial beef extract. The whole thing takes about twenty minutes, and the only real technique is getting colour on the sugared onion.
- The hinge: cook the onion until it brownsThe hinge: colour on the onion -- "Cook with sugar" points to browning the chopped onion with the sugar; the recipe does not say what fat to use, and the two tablespoons of butter are called for in the flour blending. That caramelisation carries most of the flavour, since the stock is a single teaspoon of extract. Pale onion gives you thickened salt water.
- Larkin Extract of BeefA concentrated beef extract of the Bovril and Liebig type, sold as a Larkin house brand. Any beef extract works; one teaspoon is roughly the equivalent of one to two bouillon cubes, or substitute 3 pints of good beef stock for the extract and water together.
- The salt is very highA full tablespoon of table salt in three pints, on top of beef extract that is already largely salt, will taste harsh to modern palates. Start with a teaspoon, dissolve the extract, and season at the end.
- Blending flour and butter"Blend flour and butter" could mean either a cooked roux or flour and butter worked together cold; the recipe does not say. If cooking it, melt the butter, stir in the flour and let it cook a minute or two before the hot liquid goes in, whisking to keep it smooth. Two tablespoons of each in three pints gives a lightly bodied soup.
- Five minutes is enoughThere is nothing in the pot that needs long cooking, and the boil is really just to cook out the raw flour. Longer only dulls the onion.
- StrainingThe recipe directs straining, which discards the onion once it has given up its flavour and leaves a smooth soup. If you would rather keep the onion, slice it thinly instead of chopping and skip the strainer.
- YieldThree pints reduces very little in five minutes, so expect about six cups — four generous first-course servings.
The Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York, was a soap manufacturer that grew into an enormous mail-order house by giving away premiums with its products, and its recipe booklets exist to put Larkin table salt, pepper, extracts and flavourings into the reader's pantry — hence the brand name attached to three of the ingredients here: table salt, extract of beef and white pepper. The dish itself is a plain brown onion soup. Bottled and jarred meat extracts, descended from Liebig's mid-nineteenth-century process, were what put a beef-flavoured soup within reach of a household that had not simmered a stockpot all day, and their arrival is why so many soups in books of this era begin with a teaspoon from a jar rather than a pound of shin.