Vegetable Soup
1/4 cup diced potato 1/4 cup diced carrots 1/4 cup diced turnips 1/4 cup chopped cabbage 2 tablespoons diced onion 2 tablespoons butter 1 cup strained tomatoes 2 cups water 1 1/2 tablespoons caramelized sugar 1 1/2 teaspoons salt Wash and dice the potatoes, carrots and turnips and chop the cabbage. Cook all the vegetables in the two cps of water until they are tender. Add the strained tomato and water, sufficient to make one quart. Add caramelized sugar, made by putting the sugar in a pan; stir constantly over the fire until melted to a syrup of a rich brown color. Add gradually enough boiling water to dissolve the caramel, and add to the soup. Season and serve.
A plain quart of vegetable soup from a wartime-era meatless book, with one unusual step: burnt-sugar syrup stands in for the colour and depth a meat stock would have given. Two things in the original need sorting out before you start.
- The butter is orphanedTwo tablespoons of butter appear in the ingredient list and are never mentioned again in the method. You can sweat the onion, carrot and turnip in it for five minutes before the water goes in, or stir it in at the end with the seasoning; the original does not say which was meant.
- The water is counted twiceYou cook the vegetables in 2 cups of water, then are told to add the tomato "and water, sufficient to make one quart." Read it as: simmer in 2 cups, then top up with tomato and more water until you have 4 cups total. Do not add a second full 2 cups.
- Caramelized sugar is the hingeThe original has you melt the sugar in a pan, stirring constantly, until it is a syrup of rich brown colour; take it to a deep amber and stop short of black or the whole quart turns acrid. Add the boiling water off the heat and at arm's length -- caramel at that temperature spits violently.
- What it is doing thereThis is period gravy browning, the same principle as bottled Kitchen Bouquet. It contributes colour and a faint bitter-sweet backbone, not sweetness. Halve it if you would rather the tomato lead.
- Strained tomatoesCooked fresh tomatoes pushed through a sieve. Passata or a smooth tomato purée (not concentrated paste) is the direct substitute, one cup.
- Cut and timingBecause everything cooks in a single short stage, dice to a scant 1/2 inch. Twenty to twenty-five minutes at a gentle simmer brings potato, carrot and turnip to tender; the cabbage will be soft well before that, so add it in the last ten minutes if you want it to keep any texture.
- SeasoningA teaspoon and a half of salt in a quart is on the assertive side for a stock-free soup and roughly right. Add most of it at the end, after the caramel, and taste.
- YieldOne quart -- two generous bowls, or four small first-course servings.
"Meatless cookery" titles multiplied in English and American kitchens around the First World War, when meat conservation was a matter of public campaigning as much as of vegetarian conviction, and books of this kind sat alongside wheatless and sugarless baking in the same effort. The technical problem such a soup faces is colour and savour: without a beef or veal stock a vegetable soup looks pale and tastes thin, and burnt sugar was one common household answer, sold commercially as browning and made at home in a pan when it was not. The vegetable list here -- potato, carrot, turnip, cabbage, onion -- is the cheap winter root cellar of the period rather than any particular regional tradition, and the single cup of strained tomato is doing the work of brightening it. The butter is listed and then forgotten, with no further mention in the method.