Beet Soup
1 pound cooked beets 2 ounces celery 2 ounces onion 1 ounce carrot 1 ounce butter 1/2 pint water 1 1/2 pints milk 2 ounces flour Cut the beetroot into small pieces, and cook with the other vegetables in the butter for five minutes. Add the water, and cook for thirty minutes. Remove the onion, celery, and carrot, and rub the beetroot through a hair-sieve. Mix the flour smoothly with a little milk, and boil the rest. Stir in the flour, and cook for ten minutes. Add the beetroot; boil up. Season and serve.
A beet velouté in all but name: aromatics sweated in butter, beets simmered and sieved, then folded into a milk-based white sauce. The points below cover the vessels, the measures and the one step that decides whether the soup is pink or grey.
- Cooked beetsThe recipe assumes beets already boiled or roasted and peeled, a standing item in a period larder. A pound is roughly three medium beets; roast them whole in foil at 400F until a knife slides in, then slip the skins off.
- The pint questionIf this is an American book, 1/2 pint is 1 cup and 1 1/2 pints is 3 cups. If the measures are imperial, they are 10 fl oz and 30 fl oz. The text is genuinely ambiguous; start with the smaller volume and thin to taste.
- Ounces are weight, not volume2 ounces celery is about one large rib, 2 ounces onion half a small onion, 1 ounce carrot a short stub. 1 ounce butter is 2 tablespoons; 2 ounces flour is a scant half cup.
- Hair-sieveA fine horsehair mesh. It is usually explained as a way of avoiding the discolouring that metal mesh could cause with acidic purees, though fine metal sieves were also simply harder to come by. A blender followed by a fine-mesh strainer does the same job in a fraction of the time, and modern stainless steel will not taint the beets.
- Don't overcook the roux stageTen minutes of boiling flour and milk is longer than needed and risks scorching on a modern flat burner. Whisk the slurry into the scalded milk and cook at a bare simmer, stirring, until it thickens and loses its raw-flour taste, five minutes is enough.
- ColourBeet pigment breaks down with prolonged heat and turns brown-mauve. "Boil up" means bring just to the boil and stop; a squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar at the end holds the red and sharpens an otherwise very sweet soup.
- SeasoningThe original leaves it entirely to the cook. Salt generously, add white pepper, and consider a little sugar or vinegar to balance; a spoonful of sour cream on serving is traditional in the Eastern European versions of the same idea.
- YieldFour to six cups depending on which pint reading you follow, serving four as a first course.
The technique is the kind of purée soup codified in nineteenth-century French professional kitchens, but the ingredient list is thoroughly domestic: milk, butter and flour give the vegetable the body a meat stock would otherwise supply, a plain white sauce carrying a beet puree. Beetroot was cheap and stored well through winter, which may be why the recipe opens with cooked beets and no instruction for cooking them. The hair-sieve is a period detail: fine sieves woven from horsehair were standard equipment before stainless steel became common in home kitchens.