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Carrot Soup (INGREDIENTS for quarts quarts)
INGREDIENTS for 4½ quarts.-4 quarts of liquor in which a leg of mutton or a joint of beef has been boiled, a few beef-bones, 6 large carrots, 2 large onions, 1 turnip; seasoning of salt and pepper to taste; cayenne. AVERAGE COST, exclusive of the liquor, 6d.
Put the liquor, bones, onions, turnip, pepper and salt into a stewpan, and simmer for 3 hours. Scrape and cut the carrots thin, strain the soup on them, and stew CARROTS, SLICED. them till soft enough to pulp through a hair sieve or coarse cloth; then boil the pulp with the soup, which should be of the consistency of pea-soup. Add cayenne.
Pulp only the red part of the carrot, and make this soup the day before it is wanted.
TIME.-4 hours.
SEASONABLE from October to March.
A frugal Victorian soup built on the water left from boiling a joint of meat. Almost everything about it translates directly; the details below are where the wording will trip you up.
- The "liquor"This is the broth left from simmering a leg of mutton or a piece of beef, not an alcoholic liquor. Four quarts is 16 cups; a good unsalted beef or lamb stock stands in, and the beef bones added on top are for body.
- Salt with cautionBoiled joints were often salted or brined, so the liquor may start out well seasoned and will concentrate further over the three hours of simmering. Season at the end, not the beginning. (The recipe itself leaves salt and pepper "to taste".)
- "Only the red part of the carrot"Beeton means the outer cortex rather than the paler, woody core, which pulps badly and tastes flat. With modern varieties the distinction barely exists, though on large old carrots it is still worth cutting the core away.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve, hair being preferred to metal for pulping vegetables. A food mill, or a blender followed by a fine mesh strainer, does the same job in a fraction of the time.
- Consistency"The consistency of pea-soup" means a pourable puree that coats a spoon. If the carrots have not thickened it enough, reduce further rather than adding flour.
- TimingThree hours for the stock base, then the carrots stewed until soft enough to pulp, which for thin slices is nearer 20 to 30 minutes; the balance of the four-hour total covers boiling the pulp back into the soup. Overcooked carrot loses its sweetness.
- Make it the day beforeThe recipe gives no reason, but chilling overnight lets the mutton or beef fat set on top so it can be lifted off, which is the difference between a clean-tasting soup and a greasy one.
- YieldFour quarts is a great deal of soup, enough for 12 to 16 as a first course. Halving or quartering the recipe changes nothing but the simmering vessel.
Carrot soup of this kind belongs to a household economy in which nothing from a boiled joint was thrown away. The pot liquor from a leg of mutton was a standing asset in the Victorian kitchen, and the costing makes the point explicitly: sixpence, "exclusive of the liquor", because the liquor had already been paid for once. The seasonal note, October to March, reflects the era before year-round imports, when carrots were a stored root crop kept in sand or clamped in earth over winter and grew coarser and woodier as the season wore on. That is also why the recipe insists on pulping only the red outer flesh and on passing everything through a hair sieve, the usual tool for vegetable purees in this period.