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Salt and Nutmeg
The stock should be made from beef and veal bones, well skimmed, but need not necessarily be clarified. The vegetables, after being washed and peeled, may be cooked whole in the stockpot.
Cut the carrot and turnip into round slices, drain the cabbage and cut into small pieces, put all the vegetables into a stewpan with the butter, cover and cook slowly for about ten minutes, season with pepper, salt, and a little grated nutmeg.
Strain the stock on to the vegetables, and let them simmer for about thirty minutes, skim occasionally. Cut the roll into thin round slices, place them on a baking sheet, bake them on both sides a golden brown in a moderate oven. Put them in a soup tureen, moisten with a little stock, pour the soup over, sprinkle over with a little chopped parsley or chives, and serve.
C2
A bread-and-vegetable soup written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen: the ingredient list lived elsewhere in the book, and the cook was expected to know the quantities. Everything here is safe to make; the difficulty is reconstructing proportions.
- No quantities are givenThe method is written without them. For about 2 quarts of stock, figure one large carrot, one small turnip, a quarter of a small cabbage, and 1 to 2 oz butter. Season at the end rather than trying to guess salt into unmeasured stock.
- The hinge is the sweating stepTen minutes covered in butter, over low heat and without colour, is what gives this soup its body and sweetness. Rushed or browned, it turns into thin boiled cabbage water.
- "A moderate oven"Roughly 350-375F. The bread slices want to dry and colour on both sides, not merely to toast on the surface; turn them and go by colour rather than the clock.
- The rollA plain white dinner roll or a length of baguette, ideally a day old. Cut it thin, about a quarter inch, so it softens into the soup rather than sitting in it as croutons.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use a restrained amount, perhaps an eighth of a teaspoon for the pot. Pre-ground nutmeg is flat by comparison and the whole point of the seasoning here is aroma.
- SkimmingBeef and veal bones throw a good deal of scum and fat. Skim during the initial simmer and again while the vegetables cook; the soup is unclarified by design, so surface fat is the only thing standing between it and a clean finish.
- Timing and yieldThirty minutes of simmering will take cabbage well past bright green, which is what the recipe intends. Two quarts of stock serves six as a first course; assemble the tureen at the last minute or the bread dissolves.
This is a bread soup of the kind that runs through French and Central European cooking under many names — panade, Brotsuppe, and the cabbage-and-bread soups of the garbure type — where dried or oven-crisped bread in the bottom of the tureen does the work that a flour thickening would do elsewhere. The pairing of a beef and veal stock with a frugal bread-and-cabbage format is worth noting in itself: the technique is thrifty, the stock is not. The scrape of nutmeg over root vegetables and cabbage is a long-standing habit in northern European kitchens, generally traced to the spice's use as a warming aromatic in dairy and vegetable dishes rather than to any single recipe. The trailing "C2" appears to be some kind of reference or printer's mark; what it points to cannot be determined from this page alone.