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Vegetable Consomme with Peas
1/2 cup diced carrots 1/3 cup diced turnips 1/3 cup chopped cabbage 1/3 cup chopped celery 1/3 cup sliced potatoes 1/3 cup sweet potatoes 1/3 cup chopped onions Bring the vegetables to a boil in one quart of water. Then cook in double boiler three hours. Reserve potatoes until one-half hour before serving. Add one and one-third cups bean stock, salt, season with thyme, add one teaspoon butter, and serve. To each serving, add a dessertspoon of canned peas. This makes one quart soup.
Soak one cup of beans in one quart of water over night. Put to cook in the same water in which they were soaked, and cook until thoroughly softened. Let them stand until settled; then strain off the clear liquid. Season with salt and pepper before adding to the vegetables. There should be one and one-third cups of it. If deficient in quantity, add sufficient water to make this amount.
A clear vegetable broth built in two parts: a long, gentle vegetable infusion and a separate bean liquor for body. Neither is difficult, but the method assumes a kitchen equipped rather differently from ours.
- Start the bean stock firstThe beans soak overnight and then simmer until soft, so plan a day ahead. Any dried white bean works; the recipe wants only the clear liquid poured off the settled pot, not the beans themselves, which can be kept for another dish.
- The three hours in a double boilerWater in the outer pan holds the soup below boiling, so the broth stays clear rather than clouding and the vegetables give up flavour without breaking apart. A heavy pot over the lowest possible burner setting, or a very low oven, does the same work. The recipe does call for an initial boil; after that, keep it from returning to a rolling boil.
- DessertspoonA dessertspoon is generally reckoned as two teaspoons, so each bowl gets about two teaspoons of peas as a garnish. Frozen peas, briefly heated, are closer to fresh than the canned peas of the period.
- Hold back the potatoesThe recipe reserves the potatoes until half an hour before serving. It lists white and sweet potatoes separately and does not say which is meant, though treating both the same way is reasonable; added at the start they would soften and could cloud the broth.
- StrainingThe recipe says nothing about straining. Given the name consomme you may strain the vegetables out, or at least lift out the softened cabbage and onion -- but the text never calls for it, and the finely diced vegetables may have been meant to reach the table with the broth.
- SeasoningThe soup itself is seasoned only with salt and thyme, though the bean stock is separately seasoned with salt and pepper before it is added, so both stages matter. A few sprigs of fresh thyme added in the last hour, or a scant half teaspoon dried, is about right for a quart; taste and salt at the end, after the bean stock has gone in.
- YieldOne quart, which is four small first-course bowls rather than four meals. The single teaspoon of butter is a finish, not a fat for cooking, and can be stirred in off the heat.
Meatless cookbooks of the early twentieth century faced a standing problem: consomme was by definition a clarified meat broth, and a vegetarian version had to find some substitute that still tasted of something. The bean stock here is the answer. Simmered pulses release starch and dissolved protein that give a thin vegetable infusion the weight and mouth-feel a cook would otherwise get from bones, and the trick of settling the pot and pouring off only the clear top liquor keeps that body without the cloudiness. The aim in such a dish is less novelty than proving that a familiar menu could be reproduced course for course. The canned peas dropped into each bowl at the last moment are a small period detail: a garnish of bright colour from the pantry.