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Two Onions (One head of Celery)
One head of Celery.
Four ounces of raw Ham or Bacon.
Two ounces of Butter.
Three pints of Stock.
Half a gill of Cream.
Half a teaspoonful of Castor Sugar.
Pepper and Salt, and a handful of cooked Rice.
Peel off the red part of the carrots, and put into a stewpan with the onions sliced, the celery cut up and the ham cut up, add two ounces of butter, put the lid on close and simmer over the fire gently for ten minutes, then add two pints of stock and simmer gently till the vegetables are tender.
Drain off the stock, pound the carrots, &c., in the mortar, add the stock they were cooked in and one pint more, pass all through a tammy-cloth or fine hair-sieve. Return this purée to the stewpan, and stir it over the fire till it boils, then stand it by the fire to clear itself of all grease, which must be taken off with a spoon as it rises. Let it boil gently for a quarter of an hour, add the cream, half a teaspoonful of sugar, a little pepper and salt. Serve with plainly cooked rice or with some fried croûtons handed separately.
This is a classic carrot purée in the Crécy manner, and the printed ingredient list is a fragment — the carrots that the method depends on never made it into the heading. Read the method first and shop from that.
- The missing carrotsThe instructions call for carrots as the main vegetable but the printed list omits them entirely; the onions survive only as the opening line of the heading. For three pints of stock, reckon on about 2 lb (900 g) of carrots and the two onions.
- "Peel off the red part"This means paring away the outer orange cortex and discarding the paler, woodier core, which is more fibrous and less sweet. The direction turns up in a number of Victorian carrot soups, and the intention is a brighter, sweeter purée; with modern young carrots you can simply use the whole root.
- MeasuresThese are imperial pints of 20 fl oz, so three pints is about 1.7 litres. Half a gill is roughly 2½ fl oz, a scant third of a cup. Castor sugar is superfine sugar; ordinary granulated dissolves fine here.
- Raw ham or baconFour ounces of unsmoked gammon or a piece of pancetta is the nearest thing. Heavily smoked supermarket bacon will dominate the carrots; if that is all you have, blanch it first.
- Sweating, not fryingThe first ten minutes with the lid on close is a sweat — keep the heat low enough that nothing colours. This is the step that builds the sweetness the soup lives on, and browning turns it muddy.
- Mortar and tammyPounding in a mortar and wringing through a tammy-cloth is simply the Victorian route to a smooth purée. A blender followed by a pass through a fine sieve or chinois gets you further in two minutes.
- DegreasingStanding the pan half off the heat drives the fat to the cool side, where it can be lifted off. Worth doing: butter and ham together leave a real slick, and cream will not mask it.
- Cream at the endBest added off the boil, and do not let the soup return to a rolling boil afterwards, which risks it separating at the surface.
- Yield and serviceThree pints should serve six to eight as a first course. The rice is an alternative garnish to the croûtons rather than a thickener stirred into the pot, and the croûtons are handed round separately so they stay crisp.
Carrot soup passed to the fine tables of Britain through the French kitchen as purée Crécy, a name generally traced to the carrot-growing districts around Crécy in northern France, and by the late nineteenth century any thickened carrot purée was liable to be called Crécy on an English menu. What marks this version as "high class cookery" is not the ingredients, which are cheap, but the labour: the vegetables are pounded in a mortar and wrung through a tammy-cloth, the soup is then stood by the fire and skimmed spoonful by spoonful until no grease rises. That sequence assumed a kitchen with staff and time. Rice or croûtons are offered as alternatives to accompany it.