Sea Kale Soup
1 pound seakale 1 ounce butter 1 pint milk 1/2 gill cream 1 pint boiling water Pepper and salt Wash, and trim the sea kale, cut it into small pieces, and cook for five minutes in the butter. Add the water, and bring to boiling point. Add the milk, and cook until the seakale is tender--about one hour. Add the cream to the soup. Cook for a few minutes. Season and serve.
A plain white vegetable soup that lives or dies on the freshness of the sea kale. The one thing to change is the hour of simmering.
- Sea kale, and what to use insteadSea kale (Crambe maritima) is the blanched shoot of a coastal perennial, sold briefly in late winter and rare outside Britain. Blanched cardoon, forced chicory, the white stems of Swiss chard or trimmed celery hearts all give a comparable sweet-bitter, faintly cabbagey result.
- An hour is far too longForced sea kale is tender in eight to twelve minutes; an hour reduces it to grey threads and drives off the delicate flavour that makes it worth buying. Simmer until a knife slides through a stem, then move on to the cream.
- A gillA gill is a quarter of a pint, so half a gill is 2 to 2 1/2 fluid ounces of cream -- about 4 to 5 tablespoons -- depending on whether the book means the 20-ounce imperial pint or the 16-ounce American one. Either way it is a finishing enrichment, not a body of liquid.
- The pintsRead the pint of milk and pint of boiling water as two cups each if you want a soup you can drink, two and a half cups each for the imperial reading. The proportion of liquid to a pound of vegetable is generous in both cases.
- Sweating in butterThe five minutes in butter should be gentle and covered, with no colour taken. Browning the kale gives the finished soup a muddy taste that the milk will not hide.
- Keeping the milk from catchingA pint of milk over direct heat for any length of time will scorch and skin. Use a heavy pan, keep it at a bare tremble rather than a boil, and stir the base of the pan.
- TextureThe recipe never sieves or blends, so the cut pieces stay in the finished soup. Blending it smooth before the cream goes in is a reasonable modern liberty and suits the stringier substitutes such as cardoon or chard stem.
- YieldFour to five cups depending on how long it simmers, serving four as a first course. Season at the end, after the cream.
Sea kale grows wild on the shingle beaches of the English Channel and North Sea coasts, where it was gathered long before it was gardened; the eighteenth-century practice was to heap shingle or sand over the emerging shoots to blanch them, and Victorian kitchen gardeners refined this into forcing under terracotta bell pots. Its promotion as a market vegetable is generally credited to the botanist William Curtis, who published on its cultivation at the very end of the 1790s, and by the nineteenth century it was a fashionable early-spring luxury sold in bundles.