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Carrot Soup (INGREDIENTS for quarts lbs)
INGREDIENTS for 2 quarts.-2 lbs. of carrots, 3 oz. of butter, seasoning to taste of salt and cayenne, 2 quarts of stock or gravy soup. AVERAGE CosT, 1s. 8d.
Scrape and cut out all specks from the carrots, wash and wipe them dry, and then reduce them into quarter-inch slices. Put the butter into a large stewpan, and when it is melted, add 2 lbs. of the sliced carrots, and let them stew gently for an hour without browning. Add to them the soup, and allow them to simmer till tender-say for nearly an hour. Press them through a strainer with the soup, and add salt and cayenne if required. Boil the whole gently for 5 minutes, skim well and serve as hot as possible.
TIME.-1¼ hour.
SEASONABLE from October to March.
A two-stage soup: the carrots are sweated in butter first, then simmered in stock and pushed through a sieve. The butter stage is the whole point and cannot be rushed.
- The hinge: sweat, do not brownAn hour of gentle stewing in butter draws out the carrots' sugars without colouring them, which is what gives the finished soup its sweetness and depth. If the slices catch and brown, the soup turns muddy and slightly bitter; keep the heat very low and stir occasionally.
- Imperial quartsBeeton's quart is 40 fl oz, so 2 quarts is about 2.4 US quarts or 2.3 litres. Scaling by US quarts simply gives a slightly thicker soup, which is no loss.
- Stated time is wrongThe headnote says TIME 1 hour, but the method calls for an hour of sweating plus nearly an hour of simmering plus 5 minutes at the end. Allow two to two and a half hours.
- Gravy soupA Victorian brown, beef-based soup. Any decent beef or chicken stock works; a light chicken stock keeps the carrot flavour clearer, beef gives a darker, more savoury result. The recipe itself allows either 'stock or gravy soup'.
- StrainingPressing 2 lbs of carrot through a sieve with the back of a ladle is real work. A blender or stick blender does it in a minute; pass the purée through a fine sieve afterwards if you want the smoothness a Victorian cook was aiming at.
- SeasoningCayenne here is a background warmth, not heat: start with a pinch for the full quantity. Salt at the end, since reduced stock concentrates as it simmers.
- Yield and servingTwo quarts serves six to eight as a first course. Serve very hot, as directed; carrot purée thickens and dulls as it cools, so ladle it into warmed bowls.
- Seasonable October to MarchThis is the season for stored maincrop carrots. Large winter carrots suit a purée well; core out any woody centre from very thick ones.
Carrot soup of this kind belongs to the nineteenth-century family of purée soups, thickened by the vegetable itself rather than by flour or bread, a technique French cookery had refined and English household books adopted through the 1800s. Beeton's opening fragment, "addition to stewed veal, &c.", appears to be the tail of the preceding entry, a reminder that these books were printed as continuous numbered paragraphs and that a modern reader is often dropped mid-sentence. The costing of 1s. 8d. for two quarts was a serious part of the book's appeal: it let a mistress of a household check her cook's spending. Carrots were credited in the period with being nourishing and easily digested.