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CHAPTER XXXVI: Soup
Vegetable Mutton Soup. 1 turnip, 1 carrot, 1 onion, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, cupful chopped celery, 1½ quarts mutton broth.
One hour before serving, cut the vegetables into slices, put in saucepan with butter and celery. Stir over the fire six minutes, then add the mutton broth, cover and cook till done, season to taste and serve. Potato Cream Soup. 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 onion, 3 stalks celery, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 meat bone, 2 quarts cold water, 2 large potatoes, + cupful milk, 1 teaspoonful chopped parsley.
Boil Place a saucepan with butter, onion, and celery over the fire; cook and stir five minutes, add salt, small meat bone, and water. Cover and cook slowly one hour, then strain the broth into another saucepan. potatoes, drain and mash them fine, add with butter and milk, to the broth, cook a few minutes, season to taste, garnish with chopped parsley and serve.
Soup Bègue (Southern recipe). 3 pounds fowl, 3 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 quarts cold water, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 cupful green lima beans (parboiled), 1 cupful sweet corn, 1 cupful diced celery, cupful stewed tomatoes, Pepper, 1 cupful cream.
Choose a young fowl, with yellow legs; after disjointing it and dividing the large pieces, brown it carefully in butter, then place in the soup kettle with water and salt, and simmer until tender. Remove the chicken, carefully skim the grease from the broth, and add to it lima beans, sweet corn, celery and tomato, with salt and pepper to taste. Simmer until the vegetables are perfectly cooked, then the choice chicken meat MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK may be cut in small pieces and added to the soup, and, lastly, the cream.
Soup à la Menestra (French recipe). 24 pints mutton broth, 1 carrot, 1 onion, 1 stalk celery, 1 cupful fine-cut cabbage, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 tablespoonful rice, Dash pepper.
Cut fine the carrot, onion, celery, and cabbage; place a saucepan with butter over the fire, add the vegetables, and cook ten minutes, then add the rice, mutton broth, salt, and pepper; boil slowly, well covered for one hour; serve with grated cheese.
Du Barry Soup (French recipe). 1 cupful rice, 2 quarts chicken stock, 1 cupful cold cauliflower, Pepper and salt, 2 cupfuls cream.
Five soups built on the same nineteenth-century pattern: sweat aromatics in butter, add a homemade broth, simmer until the vegetables are soft. Most of the work is in the stock, which the book assumes you already have on hand.
- Mutton brothNeither mutton soup here tells you how to make the broth; the book assumes broth is already to hand, as many household books of the period did. Simmer 2-3 lb of lamb or mutton neck, shank or breast in water with an onion and a bay leaf for 2-3 hours, then strain and skim; lamb is the practical substitute and gives a milder result.
- Cupful and tablespoonfulA cupful is 8 fl oz and a tablespoonful is close to the modern one. Where the printed text gives a bare "cupful" of tomatoes or milk with the fraction missing, half a cup is the safe reading in a soup of this size.
- "Cook till done"For the vegetable mutton soup that means about 20-25 minutes of gentle simmering after the broth goes in, until the turnip and carrot yield to a knife tip. Longer and the celery collapses into threads.
- Potato cream soup, order of workThe printed text is jumbled: boil the potatoes separately while the bone broth simmers, then drain, mash smooth and stir them into the strained broth with the milk, as the recipe's own wording indicates.
- Do not boil the milk or cream soupsOnce milk or cream is in, hold the pan below a simmer. A rolling boil will curdle the potato soup and split the cream in Soup Begue and Du Barry.
- The fowl in Soup Begue"Young fowl with yellow legs" was a period sign of a young bird; the recipe's 3 pounds corresponds to a modern roasting chicken of about the same weight. An older stewing hen needs closer to two hours to become tender; a supermarket chicken will be done in 45-60 minutes.
- SkimmingBecause the chicken is browned in butter first, the broth carries a good deal of fat. Chill it briefly and lift the solid cap, or blot the surface with paper, before the vegetables go in, as the recipe directs.
- Rice quantitiesOne tablespoonful of rice in what appears to be 2½ pints of Menestra is a small amount, for body only. The cupful of rice in Du Barry, against two quarts of stock, will thicken the soup heavily once cooked; no method is printed for that recipe.
- YieldYields vary with the recipe: Menestra makes about 5 cups, the vegetable mutton soup about 6-7, and Soup Begue and Du Barry 10 cups or more with their added cream.
These pages show the American household soup kettle at the turn of the twentieth century, when soup was the mechanism for using yesterday's bones and leftovers rather than a dish in its own right: a meat bone, cold cauliflower, a cup of stewed tomatoes. The French labels reflect the period's habit of borrowing restaurant vocabulary for plain domestic cooking. Du Barry is the classical culinary code word for cauliflower, generally traced to Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, and any dish so titled is a cauliflower dish; menestra is the Spanish form of the Italian minestra, a vegetable and grain soup, filed here as French because that was the prestige cuisine. Soup Begue is marked "Southern recipe" and its lima beans, corn and tomato place it firmly in the succotash-and-chicken family of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, where Begue is a well-known New Orleans name, Elizabeth Begue having kept a celebrated Creole eating house near the French Market; the attribution is traditional rather than documented here.