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Stock for Clear Soup
1 pound butter beans 2 quarts water 6 ounces onions 4 ounces leeks 6 ounces turnips 6 ounces carrots 2 ounces celery 1 ounce parsley 2 teaspoons salt 1 bay-leaf 1 teaspoon dried herbs 2 ounces butter Wash the beans, and soak all night in three pints of water. Cut up the carrots, turnips, onions, celery, leeks, and parsley, into small pieces, and fry in the butter. Add the beans, the water in which they were soaked, the salt, and the herbs and bay-leaf tied up in muslin. Bring slowly to boiling point; then add the remaining pint of water, and simmer for two hours. Strain through a hair sieve, and leave until the next day.
A vegetable-and-bean stock built for clarity rather than body, meant to be made a day ahead. The weights are the whole method here, so a scale is more use than measuring cups.
- Butter beansThese are dried lima beans, large and flat, not the canned butter beans sold ready-cooked. A pound is roughly 2 1/4 cups dried. Canned beans will not work; they give cloudy starch and no depth.
- Weights to volume6 oz onions is about one large onion, 4 oz leeks one slim leek, 6 oz turnips one medium, 6 oz carrots two medium, 2 oz celery two ribs, 1 oz parsley a generous handful with stems.
- The water, in two stagesSoak in 3 pints, then add the remaining pint once the pot reaches boiling point; 3 pints plus 1 pint accounts for the 2 quarts listed. If these are imperial pints of 20 fl oz, the volumes are larger than the same figures in US measure. The recipe gives no reason for the staged addition.
- Never let it boil hardKeep it at a simmer -- The recipe brings the pot slowly to boiling point and then holds it at a simmer for the full two hours. Hard boiling is generally held to cloud a stock by working starch and fat into the liquid.
- Fry, do not brownFry the vegetables -- The vegetables go into the 2 oz butter; the recipe does not say how far to take them. Deep browning would colour a stock meant to be clear.
- Bouquet garniMuslin is cheesecloth; a tea ball or a tied square works equally well. The recipe does not say which dried herbs are meant.
- Hair sieveA fine-mesh strainer lined with damp cheesecloth. Ladle rather than pour, and do not press the solids through, or you undo the clarity.
- The overnight restStanding until the next day lets residual sediment and butterfat settle and set on top, so both can be lifted off cleanly. Refrigerate, not room temperature, and use within four days or freeze.
- YieldLess than the 2 quarts of water that goes in, since the beans absorb a good deal of it and two hours' simmering reduces the rest.
Meatless cookery books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries faced a structural problem: a great many soups, sauces and made dishes in the standard English repertoire began with beef or veal stock. The answer, as here, was a vegetable stock given weight by a starchy pulse, and the whole logic of the recipe is imitation of consommé — the same mirepoix of carrot, turnip, onion, leek and celery, the same bouquet garni in muslin, the same insistence on straining and standing overnight so the cook can lift off the fat and pour off clear liquid. Butter beans supplied the body and faint savour that gelatine would have given a meat broth. Such books were written variously for vegetarians on principle, for Lenten and fast-day cooking, and for households where meat was simply beyond the week's budget.