Home › Soups › Carrot Soup No. 2
Carrot Soup No. 2
12 ounces carrots 4 ounces onions 2 ounces leeks 8 ounces turnips 4 ounces celery 1 ounce butter 1 quart stock 1 1/2 ounces crme de riz 1/2 pint milk 1/2 gill cream Bouquet of herbs Cut the vegetables into slices, using only the red part of the carrot, and fry in the butter to a golden brown. Add the stock, and cook for one and one-half hours. Mix the crme de riz with a little milk, and add it; cook for twenty minutes. Rub through a hair sieve. Return to the saucepan with the milk, and boil up. Add the cream to the soup, taking care not to curdle. Cook for a few minutes. Season and serve.
A classic French-style purée soup written in imperial weights, with one ingredient that has largely disappeared from British and American shops. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the instructions are worth ignoring.
- Crème de rizThis is finely milled rice flour, sold in the period as a smooth thickening powder; plain rice flour or cream of rice cereal does the same job. One and a half ounces is about 1/4 cup, slaked in cold milk before it goes into the hot soup so it does not lump.
- Weights, not cupsThe vegetable quantities are by weight and worth respecting: 12 oz carrots, 8 oz turnips, 4 oz each onion and celery, 2 oz leek. Turnip is nearly as prominent as carrot here, so the soup is sharper and more peppery than a modern carrot soup.
- A gillIn a British book of this period a gill is 5 fl oz, so half a gill is about 2 1/2 fl oz of cream, roughly 5 tablespoons. If you are reading it as an American gill (4 fl oz), 2 fl oz or about 4 tablespoons; the difference is immaterial in a quart of soup.
- The red part of the carrotOlder carrot varieties had a pale, woody core with a distinctly different flavour, which is why the instruction exists. With modern carrots there is nothing to discard beyond the stem end.
- StockIn a meatless book this means vegetable stock. Keep it light — a heavily browned or tomato-based stock will bury the carrot.
- Ninety minutes is too longSliced root vegetables in a quart of stock are fully soft in 30 to 40 minutes. A boil that long costs you the sweetness you built by frying the vegetables golden first.
- Sieve or blenderA hair sieve was horsehair mesh, the standard fine sieve before good wire mesh, and metal was generally avoided for pale or acidic purées. A blender followed by a fine strainer gives a smoother result in a fraction of the time.
- Not curdlingThe rice flour stabilises the soup considerably, but add the cream off the boil and bring it back only to a bare simmer. Season after the dairy goes in, since salt tastes different once the soup is enriched.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts finished, serving four to six as a first course.
Carrot soup thickened with rice was a fixture of the professional potage purée repertoire that British cookery absorbed from French kitchens in the nineteenth century, where a starch — rice, rice flour, or a panade of bread — did the work now done by potato or simply by a blender. Crème de riz was a commercial product of that era, a ready-milled rice powder sold alongside cornflour and arrowroot for thickening soups and invalid dishes.