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One Onion (Two leaves of Celery)
Two leaves of Celery.
One ounce of Butter.
One pint of Stock.
One gill of Cream.
Salt. Fried Bread.
Wash all the vegetables, and cut them into thin slices.
Melt the butter in a stewpan; put in the sliced vegetables. Place the stewpan on the fire and let the vegetables cook for five minutes; then add the stock, and boil slowly until the vegetables are quite tender. Now rub the vegetables through a tammy-cloth or hair-sieve. Put the soup back in a saucepan, add the cream, and when hot it is ready to serve. Take two or three slices of stale bread; remove the crust, and cut the crumb into dice. Fry either in fat or butter, and serve with the soup.
A plain onion purée of the kind Victorian cookery books ran in series, one page per vegetable. It works, but two details in the wording need translating before you start.
- The gillA gill is a quarter of a pint: 5 fl oz in imperial measure, roughly two-thirds of a US cup (the American gill is smaller, 4 fl oz or half a cup). The pint of stock is likewise imperial, so 20 fl oz rather than 16.
- "Two leaves of celery"In nineteenth-century kitchen English this may well mean two ribs cut from the head rather than two green leaf tops. Either reading is defensible; ribs give the fuller flavour, and the leaves alone would barely register against an onion.
- Sweat, do not colourThe five minutes in butter is the hinge of the whole dish. Keep the heat low and the pan covered so the onion goes translucent and sweet; any browning turns a pale ivory soup grey and gives it a caramelised edge the recipe does not want.
- Tammy-cloth and hair-sieveBoth are straining cloths and fine mesh sieves used to force cooked vegetables to a purée. A blender or food mill does the job in seconds; pass the result through a sieve if you want the smoothness the original was after.
- Do not boil after the cream"When hot it is ready to serve" is meant literally. Bring it back to just steaming; a hard boil with cream in it risks separation and flattens the flavour.
- ConsistencyOne onion in a pint of liquid gives a thin, almost broth-like soup, which is why the fried bread matters. If you want body, reduce the stock before sieving rather than adding flour, which this recipe does not use.
- SeasoningPeriod stock was often only lightly salted, so the bare "Salt" here may mean real seasoning at the end. With commercial stock, taste before adding any.
- YieldAbout a pint and a quarter of finished soup: two modest servings, or four as the first course of a longer meal.
Books of this vintage often set out cream soups as a template repeated vegetable by vegetable — onion, turnip, carrot, artichoke — each with the same butter, stock, sieve and gill of cream, which is why this page reads as a fragment: it is one entry in a run. The technique is the French purée soup naturalised into English service, and the dice of fried stale bread are croûtons. The sieving is the labour the recipe hides. Forcing cooked onion through a tammy — a loosely woven worsted cloth, sometimes twisted between two people, or through horsehair mesh — was heavy work, and the smooth, strainless soups of the period's dining rooms depended on kitchen staff who are invisible on the page.