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Vegetable Soup
Before breakfast, wash a beef shank in several waters, break the bone, and put it in a large pot of cold water. Keep it steadily boiling until one hour before dinner, when the following vegetables, previously prepared, must be added to the soup after it has been carefully skimmed of all grease, and strained. 1 quart peeled and chopped tomatoes. 1 pint lima or butter beans. 1 pint grated corn. 1 pint chopped cabbage. 1 pint sliced Irish potatoes. 1 sliced turnip. 1 carrot. A little minced onion. Parsley. 1 tablespoonful pepper sauce. 1 heaping tablespoonful flour rubbed into-- 1 teacup milk. 1 teacup brown sugar. 1 teaspoonful black pepper. Boil an hour: thicken with mixed milk and flour, and serve.
A piece of middling, bacon, or any other kind of meat, may be used instead of the beef shank. The best meat of the shank may be freed from gristle, chopped fine and made into a nice stew by adding 1 grated turnip. 1 mashed potato. 1 tablespoonful pepper sauce. 1 tablespoonful made mustard. 1 tablespoonful butter. 1 teaspoonful celery seed. 1 teaspoonful fruit jelly. 1 teacup milk. Minced onion and parsley. Boil up and serve.--Mrs. S.T.
A full-day household soup: the stock goes on at breakfast and the vegetables meet it an hour before dinner. The proportions are generous and the sugar is the one line worth pausing over.
- The brown sugarA teacup of brown sugar (on the usual reckoning, something close to 3/4 cup) in a pot this size reads as very sweet to modern palates, though sweetening of vegetable soups turns up here and there in nineteenth-century Southern books. Start with a tablespoon or two, taste at the end, and add more only if you want it.
- Teacup and other vague measuresA teacup of this period is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, or 6 fluid ounces, rather than a modern 8-ounce cup, though the book gives no definition. A pint of chopped vegetables is a volume measure, so weigh nothing and simply fill a pint measure.
- Timing the stock"Before breakfast" to "one hour before dinner" implies a stretch of perhaps five to eight hours, depending on when dinner was taken. The recipe says to keep it steadily boiling, but a bare simmer will give a clearer broth and leave the shank meat in better shape for the stew; skim as scum rises.
- Skim and strain firstThis is the hinge of the recipe. Chilling the strained stock and lifting the solid fat off the top is far more effective than skimming hot, and it is what keeps a soup of this length from tasting greasy under the vegetables.
- Ingredient namesIrish potatoes are ordinary white potatoes, distinguished from sweet potatoes, which a Virginia cook would otherwise have assumed. Middling is the cured side meat of the pig, close to what is sold as slab bacon or salt pork; if you use it, hold back on salt. Pepper sauce means a thin vinegar-and-hot-pepper infusion rather than a thick modern chili sauce.
- Grated cornGrating means scraping the cut ears so the milky pulp comes away and the hulls stay behind. Reckon on three or four ears for a pint. Frozen kernels work but will not thicken the soup the way scraped corn does.
- The milk-and-flour thickeningRub the flour into cold milk to a smooth slurry, stir it in at the end, and let it cook only two or three minutes. Left to boil hard it will catch on the bottom and the milk may separate against the tomatoes.
- SaltThe original never mentions it. Season the finished soup rather than the long-boiled stock, or it will concentrate past what you want; if you use the middling or bacon, hold back further.
- YieldThe vegetables alone come to about three quarts, so expect a large potful -- enough for a table of eight or so -- plus the separate shank-meat stew.
This is plantation and townhouse economy written out in full: one beef shank yields both the day's soup and a second dish from the meat picked off the bone, with nothing wasted but the gristle. The vegetable list is a Virginia summer garden -- tomatoes, lima or butter beans, corn scraped from the cob, cabbage, turnip -- and it marks the soup as seasonal rather than year-round. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, which is why the recipe ends with initials rather than a byline. The sweetening with brown sugar and the finishing with a fruit jelly in the stew both belong to an older tradition, traceable in English cookery well before this book, of using sugar and preserves as seasoning for meat rather than reserving them for dessert.