Hessian Soup
INGREDIENTS for 5 quarts of soup. - Half an ox's head, 1 pint of split peas, 8 carrots, 6 turnips, 8 potatoes, 6 onions, 1 head of celery, 1 bunch of savoury herbs, pepper and salt to taste, 2 blades of mace, a little allspice, 4 cloves, the crumb of a French roll, 6 quarts of water.
AVERAGE COST, 2s. 6d.
Clean the head, rub it with salt and water, and soak it for 5 hours in warm water. Simmer it in the water till tender, put it into a pan and let it cool; skim off all the fat, take out the head, and add the vegetables cut up small, and the peas which have been previously soaked; simmer them without the meat, till they are done enough to pulp through a sieve. Put in the seasoning, with the pieces of meat cut up; give one boil and serve.
TIME.-4 hours.
SEASONABLE in winter.
Note. An excellent hash or ragout can be made by cutting up the nicest parts of the head, thickening and seasoning more highly a little of the soup, and adding a glass of port wine and 2 tablespoonfuls of ketchup.
Hidden Mountain, The. (A pretty Supper Dish.) - INGREDIENTS for 1 dish.-6 eggs, a few slices of citron, sugar to taste, 1/4 pint of cream, a layer of any kind of jam. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 3d.
Beat the whites and yolks of the eggs separately then mix them and beat well again, adding a few thin slices of citron, the cream, and sufficient pounded sugar to sweeten it nicely. When the mixture is well beaten, put it into a buttered pan, and fry the same as a pancake; but it should be three times the thickness of an ordinary pancake. Cover it with jam, and garnish with slices of citron and preserved cherries if at hand. This dish is served cold.
TIME. About 10 minutes to fry the mixture.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A frugal winter pot-soup built on split peas and half an ox head, from the era when a butcher would sell you exactly that. The page also carries the tail end of the next entry, "The Hidden Mountain," which is a separate sweet omelette and not part of the soup.
- The ox headHalf a head is a large, awkward object, well over 10 lb of bone, skin, cheek and tongue-root, and no supermarket carries it. A halal or ethnic butcher may order one; otherwise 3 lb of beef cheek plus 2 lb of shin on the bone, or 3 lb of oxtail, gives the same gelatinous body and picks apart the same way.
- Skim cold, not hotThe instruction to cool the broth in a pan before skimming is the hinge of the recipe. Head meat throws an enormous amount of fat, and it lifts off as a solid cap once chilled overnight; skimming while hot leaves the soup greasy no matter how long you work at it.
- Peas and vegetables cooked apart from the meatThe meat comes out before the vegetables go in, so the peas can be cooked hard enough to pulp through a sieve without the meat shredding to nothing. A food mill or a few pulses of a stick blender does the sieving; keep it slightly coarse rather than smooth.
- The French rollThe crumb of a French roll appears in the ingredients and then never again in the method. It was presumably intended as a thickener, going in with the vegetables. Add about a cup of torn crumb from a plain white loaf before you pulp, or leave it out and let the peas do the work.
- Quantities and yieldSix quarts of water reduce to about five quarts of soup, which is 16 to 20 servings. Halving it works cleanly. One pint of split peas is about 2 cups dry, soaked overnight.
- Whole spiceTwo blades of mace are the lacy outer coat of nutmeg, sold whole in good spice shops; something in the region of 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon of ground mace stands in. Tie the mace, allspice and cloves in muslin so you can pull them out, since four cloves in five quarts is easy to overshoot if they break up.
- Real timingThe stated four hours covers the simmering, not the soaking or the overnight chill. Allow the 5-hour soak, 3-4 hours to bring the head to tender, cooling time, then another hour for the peas and roots. It is a two-day soup.
- The ragout noteThe hash at the end is worth doing with the cheek meat: thicken a ladle or two of the soup, season it up, and finish with port and mushroom ketchup. Modern tomato ketchup is not the same thing; use mushroom ketchup or Worcestershire sauce.
The name is generally traced to Hesse in west-central Germany, whose troops were hired out to European armies through the eighteenth century and whose name became a byword in English for plain soldierly provisioning; a thick pea soup carrying scraps of boiled meat is exactly the sort of ration-hall dish the label attached to. Beeton places it among her cheap large-quantity soups, and the average cost of 2s. 6d. for five quarts is the point of the entry, since half an ox head was one of the least expensive sources of meat and gelatine on the Victorian butcher's slab. The closing note simply directs that the nicest parts of the meat be picked out and used separately.