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Thick Vegetable Soup
1/4 cu dried split peas 1/4 cup dried white beans 1 cup dried potatoes 1/2 cup diced vegetable oysters 1 1/2 cups cut celery 1/2 cup diced turnips 1/2 cup diced carrots 1 cup strained tomatoes 2 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon chopped parsley 1 1/2 teaspoons salt Soak the peas and beans over night. Cook them in sufficient water to cover until tender. Add the other vegetables, and cook until all are tender. Add water to make one and one-half quarts of soup, then add salt and butter, and serve.
A straightforward pulse-and-root soup that hinges on one unfamiliar vegetable and one probable typesetting slip.
- Vegetable oystersThis is salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius), a slim pale root named for a faint shellfish flavour. Peel it under water with a little lemon or vinegar added, as the cut surfaces brown within minutes; scorzonera or parsnip is the nearest substitute.
- "1 cup dried potatoes"This may be a compositor's repeat of "dried" from the lines above, for diced potatoes. Dehydrated potato was also a genuine commodity in this period, and the method gives no separate rehydration step either way. Diced fresh potato will serve.
- Soaking and cooking the pulsesOvernight soaking is still the best route to even texture. Split peas will collapse into the broth in 30-40 minutes while white beans want 45-60; expect the peas to do most of the thickening, which is the point of the title.
- Salt timingThe salt goes in at the end here. Cooks have long held that early salting slows beans' softening, though modern testing disputes it. Taste again after the tomato, which brings its own acidity and needs balancing.
- Strained tomatoesTomato pulp put through a sieve to remove skin and seed; a cup of passata or well-blitzed tinned tomato is the equivalent. Add it once the beans are already tender, since acid stalls their cooking.
- Root vegetablesCelery, turnip, carrot and salsify all soften at different rates. Start the turnip and carrot, and give the celery and salsify the last 12-15 minutes so they keep some definition.
- YieldA quart and a half, so four generous bowls or six smaller servings. The butter and parsley are finishing touches — stir the butter in off the heat so it enriches rather than separates.
Books published under titles like Meatless Cookery are often associated with the First World War conservation campaigns, when American and British households were urged to observe meatless days so that meat and fats could go to the armies and to allied Europe, though such titles also served vegetarian and household-economy readerships before and after the war. Soups of this kind did the heavy lifting: dried peas and beans supplied the protein that a stock bone would once have hinted at, and a spoonful of butter stood in for the fat that meat would have contributed. Salsify, here under its older market name of vegetable oyster, was a common kitchen-garden root through the nineteenth century and is often said to have been valued in Lenten and meatless cooking precisely because its flavour was thought to suggest shellfish. Its near-disappearance from shops is a fair measure of how much the ordinary vegetable market has narrowed since this book was set in type.