Vegetable Soup
Chop and cook a choice of vegetables : cabbage, carrot, potato, turnip, tomato. Cook these vegetables in boiling salted water and add to the stock.
A two-sentence outline rather than a formula: the assumption is that a pot of stock is already on hand and the cook knows how much. A few decisions have to be made that Estes leaves to judgment.
- The stock is the recipeEverything here depends on a well-made stock from the soup recipes earlier in the book. With a good stock you get soup; with water and a bouillon cube you get boiled vegetables in salty liquid.
- Cook separately, then combineBoiling the vegetables in salted water and adding them to the stock afterwards keeps cabbage and turnip sulphur out of the stock and stops potato starch from clouding it, which matters if the soup is meant to be clear. Whether that was the reasoning, the text does not say.
- Cut to one sizeSmall dice, roughly half an inch, for everything. Cabbage shredded rather than diced.
- Stagger the boilingCarrot and turnip want 8-10 minutes, potato 6-8, cabbage 3-4, tomato barely a minute. Cooking them in one pot until the turnip is done leaves the cabbage grey and the tomato dissolved.
- TomatoIn 1911 this would likely have been peeled and seeded fresh tomato in season or canned tomato out of it. Either works; add it last so the acid does not firm up the potato.
- Salting twiceThe vegetable water is salted and the stock is presumably already seasoned. Taste after combining rather than before, or the finished soup will be over-salted.
- FinishingSimmer the combined pot only long enough to heat through, two or three minutes. Chopped parsley off the heat is period-appropriate and useful.
Good Things to Eat was published in 1911 by Rufus Estes, who was born enslaved in Tennessee in 1857 and went on to cook for the Pullman Company's private railcars and later for the Chicago subsidiary of United States Steel. The book is one of the earliest cookbooks published by an African American chef, and its structure reflects a professional kitchen rather than a household one: soups are built on stocks made earlier and elsewhere, so a recipe like this one can be two sentences long and still be complete for its intended reader. The dish itself has no fixed identity, and that is the point of the word "choice" -- the printed cabbage, carrot, potato, turnip and tomato come without quantities, and are less a shopping list than an indication of the kind of vegetables intended.