Luncheon Soup
Grate about 2 tablespoonfuls of cheese, for the strength and flavor of the cheese must be taken into consideration. Place over the fire in a small agate pan to melt, adding a little milk to keep it from burning. Place 1 quart of milk in a double boiler, add a little vermicelli and let it boil till the vermicelli softens; the vermicelli is used in preference to macaroni because it softens more easily, but left over macaroni and cheese can be used in making this soup, adding a little more cheese if necessary. The soup is more delicate if the macaroni has been made without tomato sauce, but even with the tomato a delicious soup is possible. Stir the grated cheese into the milk and vermicelli, then add carefully 2 well-beaten eggs, stirring them in slowly, so that the soup will not curdle. Stir till the eggs are cooked and the soup thickens slightly, then serve at once with saltines, A little paprika or cayenne can be used by way of seasoning, but most cheese requires no salt.
Split or Dried Pea Soup Pick over and thoroughly wash i pint of dried yellow or green peas. Cover with cold water and soak over night. Drain, rinse and drain again. Add 2 quarts of cold water, put on the back of the fire, heat slowly and boil gently until they break and are mushy. This will take at least three hours, probably longer. When they begin to break cook together in a frying-pan I large onion chopped fine, ½ cupful of chopped carrot, 2 tablespoonfuls of chopped turnip, 2 stalks of cut celery and 2 tablespoonfuls of dripping.
Cook slowly and when light brown add 2 tablespoonfuls of flour and stir until it is absorbed. Add this gradually to the soup, stirring until it thickens, season to taste with salt and pepper and simmer for another hour. Rub through a sieve and return to the fire. If too thick add boiling water until of the right consistency. Boil up once and it is ready. To this there may be added some strained canned tomatoes; or at another time a ham bone or any cooked meat bone that may be in the pantry. Lentil and black bean soup may be made in the same way.
Two soups sit on this page: a quick cheese-and-vermicelli milk soup thickened with egg, and a long-simmered split pea. Both assume a coal range where a pot can sit at the back for hours, and both leave quantities to the cook's judgement.
- The hinge: the eggsBeat the eggs, then temper them — ladle a little of the hot milk into them, whisk, and only then pour the mixture back into the pan. Added straight to a quart of near-boiling milk they scramble, and the soup is past saving; keep it below a simmer while it thickens.
- Agate panAgateware is speckled enamel over steel, the standard cheap saucepan of the period. Any small heavy saucepan does, and a nonstick one is kinder to melting cheese.
- How much vermicelli"A little" is genuinely unmeasured. For a quart of milk, roughly 1 to 1½ oz of vermicelli broken into short lengths gives a soup rather than a porridge; it swells considerably and will keep thickening as it stands.
- Cheese quantityTwo tablespoons of grated cheese in a quart of milk is a very faint flavour by modern taste, which is why the author tells you to judge by strength. A sharp aged cheddar or dry Parmesan at three or four times that amount is closer to what most cooks now expect.
- YieldNeither yield is given. The cheese soup, from a quart of milk, would serve roughly four as a first course; the pea soup, from a pint of dried peas and two quarts of water, perhaps six to eight bowls depending on how far it is let down at the end.
- A pint of dried peasMeasured by volume, not weight: about 2 cups, roughly 14 oz. The overnight soak and the three-hour simmer are both still correct for whole dried peas; split peas break down in about an hour and a half and need no soaking at all.
- DrippingSaved fat from roast beef or pork. Bacon fat, butter or oil all work; the point is a browned mirepoix, so let the vegetables take real colour before the flour goes in.
- SievingRubbing through a sieve was the usual way to purée in a home kitchen of this date. A stick blender does it in seconds, though passing the blended soup through a sieve afterwards still catches the pea skins and is what makes the difference between rustic and smooth.
- Ham boneIf you add one, hold back on salt until the end — cured pork will season the pot on its own, and the recipe's "season to taste" comes an hour before serving.
Both of these belong to an economy tradition: a soup built on milk, a handful of pasta and the end of a piece of cheese, and another built on the cheapest protein in the dry-goods shop. Vermicelli and macaroni were widely available in American grocers by the late nineteenth century, generally sold loose by the pound and long treated as an ingredient to be boiled soft rather than served al dente — hence the author's practical preference for vermicelli, which simply gives way sooner. The instruction to recycle yesterday's macaroni and cheese into today's soup, tomato sauce and all, is the real signature of the genre: nothing in the pantry is beneath use, and the recipe is written to accommodate whatever happens to be there. The split pea soup, with its browned onion, carrot, turnip and celery worked in with flour, is a domestic version of the purée of peas found in professional kitchen manuals of the same era, scaled down and finished with whatever bone the household had saved.