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Brown Soup with Forcemeat Balls
3/4 lb. lean beef I carrot 2 onions 1 teaspoonful whole peppers 1 teaspoonful salt Few sprigs parsley 2 stalks celery 3 pints (6 cups) water I turnip 1 tablespoonful mushroom ketchup 4 cloves 1 teaspoonful powdered herbs 2 tablespoonfuls (1½ ozs.) butter 2 tablespoonfuls (11/½ ozs.) flour 1 teaspoonful kitchen bouquet Some forcemeat balls Melt the butter in a large marmite, let it get brown, then brown in it the onions, cut in rings; remove the onions from the pot, and brown the flour in the butter; then add the water and the kitchen bouquet, stir till smooth, allow this to boil, put back the onions, and add the vegetables cut into neat pieces, the meat cut up into small pieces, and the seasoning; simmer for one and a half hours, remove the meat, and rub through a sieve as much of the vegetables with the soup as possible.
I2 Put the soup back into the marmite with the meat and some forcemeat balls (made as undernoted); simmer again for fifteen minutes, skim off the fat if necessary, and serve in small fireproof dishes.
A brown soup of the old school: flour browned in butter, a long simmer, then the vegetables pushed through a sieve to thicken the broth. Almost everything translates directly; the vocabulary is what dates it.
- The marmiteA marmite here is simply a deep lidded stockpot, originally earthenware. Any heavy 4-quart pot or Dutch oven works, and a heavy base matters because the flour is browned in butter over direct heat.
- Browning the flourThis is the hinge. The roux needs to go a real nut-brown for the colour and flavour the recipe is named for, which takes several minutes of constant stirring over medium heat, and it will scorch in seconds if left. Add the water gradually off the heat and whisk smooth before returning it to the boil.
- Kitchen bouquetA commercial caramel-and-vegetable browning liquid, still sold under that name. A teaspoon is for colour, not seasoning; leave it out and the soup is paler but no worse.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, not the tomato condiment. Bottled versions are still made; soy sauce with a little Worcestershire is a common stand-in for the tablespoonful called for here.
- Whole peppers and powdered herbsWhole peppers are black peppercorns. Tie them with the cloves and parsley in muslin so they can be lifted out before sieving. "Powdered herbs" means a ground dried mixture in the thyme-marjoram-savory range; a teaspoon of dried mixed herbs is close enough.
- SievingPressing the cooked vegetables through a sieve with the broth is what gives the body. A food mill or a brief pass with a stick blender followed by a strainer gives the same result with far less work; a full blender purée makes it thicker than intended.
- Forcemeat ballsThe recipe points to a companion entry ('made as undernoted'). Recipes of this kind generally use finely minced veal or beef bound with breadcrumbs soaked in milk, egg and seasoning, rolled marble-sized. Fifteen minutes of simmering suits balls of that size; anything larger needs longer, and boiling hard will break them up.
- YieldSix cups of water and three-quarters of a pound of beef makes four to six servings as a first course. The instruction to serve in small fireproof dishes is a style note from a book about casserole cookery, not a requirement.
Brown soup was one of the standard household soups of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and American cookery: browned flour and browned onion did the colouring work that long-reduced stock did in a professional kitchen. The vocabulary here is borrowed from French practice — marmite for the stockpot, forcemeat from the older English rendering of farce, stuffing. Mushroom ketchup and kitchen bouquet belong to the same impulse: bottled shortcuts to depth of colour and savour, stocked in the period before commercial bouillon cubes were widely available. Its appearance in a book devoted to casserole dishes reflects an interest in cooking and serving in the same earthenware vessel.