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White Vegetable Soup
1/2 pound turnips 1/2 pound carrots 4 sticks of celery 1 ounce butter 1/2 bay leaf 1 pint boiling stock 1 pint boiling water 1/2 pint milk 1 ounce flour Pepper and salt Cut the vegetable into long shreds, and cook them in the butter for five minutes. Add the bay leaf, stock and water, and cook gently until the vegetables are tender. Mix the flour smoothly with the milk, add it to the soup, and cook for ten minutes. Remove the bay leaf add the seasoning, and serve.
Care should be taken to cook the vegetables the proper length of time so they will be tender but not mushy. A teaspoon of sugar may be added if desired.
A plain sweated-vegetable soup thickened at the end with a milk-and-flour slurry. The only real technique is judging the vegetables — cut evenly and pulled at the right moment, they stay in distinct shreds rather than collapsing.
- The hinge: cut and timingShred the turnip, carrot and celery into even matchsticks; the recipe gives no dimensions, but something around 2 inches by 1/8 inch will cook through in roughly a quarter of an hour of gentle simmering. Uneven or much thicker cuts are the usual reason some shreds go soft before others are done.
- "Stock" here means vegetable stock"Stock" is unspecified -- The recipe does not say what kind. For a white soup a pale, light stock suits best; one built on onion, leek, celery and parsley stalk keeps the colour, while anything tomato-based or heavily browned will muddy it.
- Pints, if the book is BritishAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, a US pint 16. Written to imperial measure the soup takes 2.5 cups stock, 2.5 cups water and 1.25 cups milk. Using US pints simply gives a slightly thicker, more concentrated result — either works.
- WeightsHalf a pound of turnips is about 225 g, roughly two small ones; the same again in carrots is two or three medium. Four sticks of celery means four ribs from the head, not four whole heads.
- The butter stageOne ounce is 2 tablespoons. Five minutes over low heat is a sweat, not a fry — keep the lid on and the pan below colouring temperature, since any browning defeats the point of a white soup.
- The thickeningWhisk the flour into cold milk until entirely smooth before it goes near the pot, and stir as it comes back to a simmer. The ten minutes is not arbitrary: it is what cooks the raw starch taste out of the flour.
- Seasoning lastThe recipe holds the pepper and salt back to the end, after the bay leaf comes out. White pepper keeps the appearance clean; the optional teaspoon of sugar will offset any sharpness from the turnip.
- YieldThe liquids total 2.5 pints before cooking, so a little less once simmered -- four modest bowls as a first course, two as a light supper with bread.
A "white soup" in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookery meant one finished pale with cream, milk or ground almonds, as opposed to a brown soup built on browned meat and bones, and the distinction shaped the soup chapters of many household manuals. Meatless cookery books were numerous in Britain and America around and after the First World War, when meat was rationed or expensive and meatless days were observed, and a soup of this kind -- vegetable stock with a milk-and-flour liaison doing the work of a meat broth -- fits that pattern, though nothing in the recipe itself identifies it as meatless. Turnip, carrot and celery were the standard English soup roots, cheap and available through winter.