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CHAPTER XXXVI: Tabasco
1 tablespoonful McIlhenny's. 2 tablespoonfuls McIlhenny's. 1/2 teaspoonful peppercorns, 1/2 bayleaf, Boil rice in the stock, add cauliflower pressed through a potato ricer. Season with white pepper and salt, add cream and bring again to the boil. Serve in bouillon cups; garnish with small flowerets of cauliflower. Oxtail Soup à la Tabasco. 1 oxtail, 2 onions, 1 tablespoonful parsley, Garlic, 1 tablespoonful McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce, 6 cloves, 6 allspice berries, 2 hard-boiled eggs, 1 lemon.
Cut the oxtail into small pieces, chop the other ingredients, and rub into a tablespoonful lard and a tablespoonful sifted flour. Mix thoroughly and brown without burning. Add cloves, allspice, and salt to taste.
Fry ten minutes, stirring often. Add hot water enough to make the soup.
Cook from three to four hours. Put into a tureen the eggs and lemon sliced in small pieces. Pour the soup into this through a strainer, and serve.
Fish Chowder. 4 pounds fish, ½ pound pork, 2 onions, 1 quart potato cubes parboiled, 1½ quarts water, 2 tablespoonfuls flour, 2 tablespoonfuls McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce, 1 cupful tomatoes.
Skin the fish and cut the flesh from the bones. Put the bones on to cook in the water and boil ten minutes.
Fry the pork, then add the onions, cut into slices. Cover and cook five minutes; add the flour, cook ten minutes longer. To this add the water in which the fish bones were cooked and boil for five minutes; then strain all on the potatoes and fish. Add salt and tabasco and let it simmer fifteen minutes. Add tomatoes, let it boil up once, and serve.
White Soup Stock. 3 pounds knuckle veal, 1 pound lean beef, 3 quarts boiling water, 1 onion, 6 slices carrot, 1 large stalk celery, teaspoonful peppercorns, bayleaf, 2 sprigs thyme, 2 cloves.
Wipe veal, remove from bone, and cut in small pieces; cut beef in pieces, put bone and meat in soup kettle, cover with cold water, and bring quickly to boiling point; drain, throw away the water. Wash thoroughly bones and meat in cold water; return to kettle, add vegetables, seasonings, and 3 quarts boiling water. Boil three or four hours; the stock should be reduced one half. -FANNIE M. FARMER, SOUPS Purée de Lentilles (French recipe).
This page is a run of soup recipes lifted from a Tabasco promotional pamphlet, with a stray tail-end of a cauliflower purée at the top and Fannie Farmer's white stock at the bottom. Each stands alone; treat them separately.
- The opening fragmentThe first three sentences are the tail of a cauliflower soup whose ingredient list would have fallen on the preceding page. Read as given, it calls for rice simmered in stock with riced cauliflower, finished with cream. Without the quantities it is a method, not a recipe.
- Tabasco by the tablespoonA full tablespoon in the oxtail soup and two in the chowder is a great deal by modern palates, though these are large pots. Add half, then taste at the end of cooking, since long simmering mutes the heat but not the vinegar.
- "Hot water enough to make the soup"For one oxtail with the browned aromatics, something in the region of 3 quarts. The oxtail should be well covered throughout the three to four hours; top up as it reduces.
- Browning the oxtailThe instruction to rub the chopped vegetables and meat into lard and flour and "brown without burning" is the hinge of the oxtail soup. The flour must take on a nutty brown colour over steady medium heat — pale flour gives a thin, floury broth, scorched flour turns the whole pot bitter and cannot be rescued.
- Straining onto egg and lemonThe hard-boiled eggs and sliced lemon go into the tureen cold and the strained soup is poured over. Do not simmer the lemon in the pot; the pith turns the broth bitter over four hours.
- Chowder fish and timingAny firm white fish works — cod, haddock, pollock. Fifteen minutes of simmering will overcook fish cut in serving pieces; the flesh needs about five to eight minutes once the strained liquid is added, so add it toward the end rather than at the start of the simmer.
- Salt porkThe half pound of pork means salt pork, diced and rendered for its fat and its salt. Unsmoked bacon or pancetta substitutes; if you use anything cured and smoked, cut back the added salt.
- Blanching the stock meatFarmer's instruction to bring the bones to a boil, drain, and throw away the water is not waste — it removes the scum that would otherwise cloud a white stock. Wash the bones after draining and start again with boiling water, and skim as it comes up.
- Knuckle of vealA veal knuckle is the joint end of the leg, sold today as veal shank or osso buco bones. Its gelatine is what makes white stock set; a beef shank bone will not give the same pale colour or clean flavour.
- Reduce by halfThree quarts down to a quart and a half over three to four hours means an uncovered pot at a bare tremble. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat and clouds the stock.
The branded phrasing "McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce" in every ingredient list suggests these came from promotional recipe literature rather than kitchen notes; the McIlhenny family began bottling the sauce on Avery Island, Louisiana, in the late 1860s. Household compendia of the period reprinted such material freely, which is why manufacturer's copy, a French purée and a stock recipe credited to Fannie Merritt Farmer — principal of the Boston Cooking School and author of the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book — sit on the same page without comment. Oxtail soup and fish chowder were thoroughly conventional American dishes by 1900, and the argument here is simply that a spoonful of Louisiana pepper sauce belonged in them.