Home › Soups › Vegetable Bouillon
Vegetable Bouillon
2 cups sliced tomatoes 2 2/3 cups sliced carrots 2/3 cup sliced turnips 1/2 cup dried peas 1 teaspoon salt 3 quarts water Soak the dried peas over night. Then put to cook in cold water, letting it come slowly to the boiling point. Simmer for four hours or until the peas are thoroughly softened. Pare, and slice the turnips and carrots, and add to the peas about one hour and a half before they have finished cooking. Pare the potatoes, and slice, and add them to the peas and other ingredients a half hour before the are finished cooking. When all are tender, drain off the liquid, which should equal one quart in quantity. If there is not this quantity, add sufficient water to make one quart. If desired, one tablespoon Japanese sauce or Soy may be added. To each serving add a tablespoon small string beans cut into short lengths.
A long-simmered vegetable stock meant to be served as a clear broth rather than a chunky soup. The ingredient list and the method do not quite match, so read both before starting.
- Missing and orphaned ingredientsThe method calls for potatoes that never appear in the ingredient list, and lists 2 cups of sliced tomatoes that the method never uses. Add the tomatoes with the carrots and turnips, and figure on about 2 cups of sliced potatoes if you want to follow the instructions as given.
- Dried peasThe overnight soak suggests whole dried peas rather than split peas; split peas would disintegrate and cloud the broth, which defeats the point of a bouillon. Modern whole peas soaked overnight will usually soften well inside two hours rather than four.
- Total timeFour hours of simmering is far longer than needed and will cook most of the flavour out. Two to two and a half hours gives a fully softened pea and a broth with more character; add the root vegetables about 45 minutes before the end and the potato in the last 20.
- Water and reductionThree quarts reduced to one quart is a serious reduction, so keep the simmer bare and the lid ajar rather than off entirely, or you will be topping up. Measure at the end as instructed and correct with water if you are short.
- Japanese sauceThe book offers 'Japanese sauce or Soy' as alternatives, and the first is most likely a period name for soy sauce. One tablespoon in a quart is a seasoning, not a flavour base; add it off the heat and taste before adding salt.
- StrainingDrain through a fine sieve or cloth and do not press the solids, which will push starch and sediment into the liquid. The spent vegetables are edible but exhausted; they are better mashed into a separate dish than returned to the bowl.
- Yield and servingOne quart serves four as a first course. The recipe does not say whether the string beans are cooked first; if you add them raw to the bowl they will only be warmed by the broth, so cut them small and blanch them for a minute if you want them tender.
Meatless cookery of this period often leaned on a vegetable bouillon, since a clear, savoury broth was expected to open a proper dinner and the usual version began with beef bones. Cooks working without meat built that savour from legumes and long-cooked roots, and the dried pea does the structural work here, contributing body and a background sweetness that carrot and turnip alone cannot. The optional "Japanese sauce or Soy" is a telling detail: soy sauce was available to American and British grocers as a bottled condiment well before the twentieth century, and it offered a shelf-stable source of the deep, meaty note that meatless food was accused of lacking.