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Vegetable Soup with Rice & Parsley
1 qt. water 5 T butter 1/2 T finely chopped parsley Salt & pepper Cut vegetables (except potatoes), and cook 10 minutes, in 4 T butter, stirring constantly. Add potatoes, cover, and cook two minutes. Add water, and boil one hour or until vegetables are soft. Beat with spoon or fork to break vegetables. Add remaining butter and parsley. Season with salt and pepper. 1 pt. tomatoes 1/2 C rice 2 t salt 1/3 t pepper
The text as printed is incomplete: the instructions call for cut vegetables and potatoes, but the ingredient list gives only water, butter, parsley and seasoning, with what looks like a second recipe's ingredients (tomatoes, rice) run onto the end. Treat it as a method rather than a formula.
- The abbreviationsT is a tablespoon, t a teaspoon, C a cup, qt a quart, pt a pint. The ingredients here run together as a single block of text, and the ingredient list and method have plainly become jumbled at some stage between the printed page and this transcription.
- Missing vegetablesNo quantities or kinds are given for the "cut vegetables." Onion, carrot, celery and turnip would all be plausible; as a working guess, something like 3 to 4 cups diced in total for 1 quart of water, plus 2 medium potatoes.
- The trailing ingredientsA pint of tomatoes and half a cup of rice are not accounted for anywhere in the method and look like stray lines from another recipe. The 2 t salt and 1/3 t pepper may belong here, since the method does call for seasoning with salt and pepper.
- The hinge is the butter sweatCooking the vegetables in 4 tablespoons of butter for a full 10 minutes with constant stirring is where much of the flavour comes from -- it is a sweat, not a browning. Keep the heat moderate and do not let the butter or the vegetables take colour.
- Boil one hour is too longBoil one hour is a maximum -- The text says "boil one hour or until vegetables are soft," and diced vegetables in a quart of water are usually soft well before that. Take the second clause as the real instruction: simmer rather than hard-boil, and start checking at 25 minutes, or the liquid will reduce considerably.
- Breaking the vegetablesBeating with a spoon or fork gives a rough, half-crushed texture that thickens the broth — this is the point, not laziness. A blender produces something quite different and much smoother.
- Butter quantityFive tablespoons for one quart is rich by current habit. The final tablespoon goes in with the parsley at the end; adding it off the heat keeps it fresh-tasting, though the recipe does not say so. Reduce it if you like, but not the initial 4 tablespoons.
- YieldRoughly a quart of finished soup, depending on how much vegetable goes in and how hard it boils.
Libertyville Presbyterian's collection belongs to a genre — the American church fundraising cookbook — that flourished from the 1870s well into the twentieth century, in which congregations sold subscriptions and advertising space alongside members' contributed receipts. The economy of the writing here is characteristic: the vegetables themselves go unlisted while the butter is counted to the tablespoon. The collision of two ingredient lists points to a familiar cause, since these books were typically assembled by volunteers and set by a local job printer rather than edited. The method itself — sweating root vegetables in fat before adding liquid, then crushing them to body the broth — is the ordinary technique of the pre-bouillon-cube kitchen, where flavour had to be built from butter and time rather than drawn from a tin.