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Vegetable Soup
2 lbs. lean beef or mutton 4 onions 2 turnips 4 carrots 5 skinned tomatoes 6 potatoes 2 parsnips 1 teaspoonful white pepper 1 tablespoonful salt 3 stalks celery 3 quarts (12 cups) cold water Cut the meat into small, neat slices; put it into a deep earthenware pan, sprinkle in the salt and pepper; add the tomatoes, sliced, the other vegetables all pared or scraped and cut into neat pieces, and the water. Cover tightly and cook slowly in the oven for two and a half hours.
If too thick, add a little boiling water before serving. 4 lbs. shin of veal I onion I blade mace 2 stalks celery I fowl
A one-pot oven soup of the kind these early casserole books were built around: everything raw into a covered earthenware pot, no browning, no stock. A few points on vessels, heat and the stray lines at the end.
- The stray ingredients at the endThe list beginning "4 lbs. shin of veal" belongs to the next recipe on the page, almost certainly a white stock or chicken broth. Ignore it; it has nothing to do with this soup.
- "Casserole" means the potIn books of this kind the casserole is the lidded earthenware or fireproof china vessel itself, not a baked dish. A heavy Dutch oven or any covered ovenproof pot of six quarts or more holds this comfortably.
- Cook slowly means 300-325FCook slowly -- the instruction is a bare simmer for two and a half hours. The book gives no temperature; in a modern oven around 300-325F a covered pot of cold water and vegetables comes up gradually and holds just below the boil, which is the point of the method.
- Preheat the earthenware carefullyUnglazed and traditional glazed earthenware cracks on thermal shock. Start it in a cold oven and let it come up with the heat rather than sliding a cold full pot into a hot one.
- SaltA full tablespoon of salt for three quarts is roughly right for a soup that gets no stock, but it depends on your salt. Add two teaspoons at the start and correct at the end.
- Skinned tomatoesScore, thirty seconds in boiling water, then peel. Out of season, a large (28 oz) tin of whole peeled tomatoes is about the equivalent of five fresh ones.
- Vegetable timingTwo and a half hours reduces potatoes and tomatoes to a thickener, which is why the recipe warns the soup may need loosening. If you want the root vegetables to hold their shape, hold back the potatoes and carrots for the last hour.
- The meatTwo pounds of lean beef sliced thin will be dry and stringy after this long. Shin, chuck or mutton neck cut into chunks rather than slices gives a better result over the same time.
- YieldThree quarts of liquid plus meat and vegetables serves eight to ten as a first course, six as a main. Skim the fat from the surface before serving.
Casserole cookery had a small vogue in Britain and America in the years before the First World War, when fireproof earthenware and "fireproof china" became cheap enough for ordinary kitchens and publishers turned out slim books devoted to the single pot. The appeal was economy of fuel and of labour: a covered vessel in a slow oven needed no watching and no stirring, and it made tough cheap cuts palatable. This soup is the method in its plainest form, closer to the older tradition of meat and roots left to their own devices than to anything with a technique in it. The tomatoes may be the modern touch; a mid-nineteenth-century vegetable soup of this shape might not have included them, though tomatoes were already in wider American use by mid-century, and their appearance here as a matter of course is often said to mark how quickly the tomato moved from suspicion to staple in the decades either side of 1900.