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Meat (INGREDIENTS for soup)
INGREDIENTS for soup for 12 persons.-6 oz. of butter, 6 onions, sliced, 4 heads of celery, 2 lettuces, small bunch of parsley, 2 handfuls of spinach, a few pieces of bread-crust, 2 blades of mace, salt and pepper to taste, the yolks of 2 eggs, 3 teaspoonfuls of vinegar, 3 quarts of water. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 10d.
Melt the butter in a stewpan and put in the onions to stew gently for 3 or 4 minutes; then add the celery, spinach, lettuces and parsley cut small. Stir the ingredients well for 10 minutes. Now put in the water, bread, seasoning and mace. Boil gently for 1½ hour; and at the moment of serving, beat in the yolks of the eggs and the vinegar, but do not let it boil, or the eggs will curdle.
TIME.-2 hours.
SEASONABLE all the year. 233 MAIZE MEAL OR HOMINY.
Maître d'Hôtel Sauce (Hot; to serve with Calf's Head, Boiled Eels and different Fish). - INGREDIENTS for sauce for dish of medium size.-1 slice of minced ham, a few poultry trimmings, 2 shalots, 1 clove of garlic, 1 bay-leaf, pint of water, 2 oz. of butter, 1 dessertspoonful of flour, 1 heaped tablespoonful of chopped parsley; salt, pepper and cayenne to taste ; the juice of large lemon, teaspoonful of pounded sugar. AVERAGE COST, 7d.
Put at the bottom of a stewpan the minced ham and over it the poultry-trimmings (if these are not at hand, veal should be substituted), with the shalots, garlic and bay-leaf. Pour in the water and let the whole simmer gently for 1 hour, or until the liquor is reduced to a full pint.
Then strain this gravy, put it in another saucepan, make a thickening of butter and flour in the above proportions and stir it to the gravy over a nice clear fire, until it is perfectly smooth and rather thick, care being taken that the butter does not float on the surface. Skim well, add the remaining ingredients, let the sauce gradually heat, but do not allow it to boil. If this sauce is intended for an entrée, it is necessary to make it of a sufficient thickness, so that it may adhere to what it is meant to cover.
Maize Meal or Hominy. Maize meal is a preparation, like cornflour, of starch prepared from maize or Indian corn, the husk and gluten being separated by grinding and the action of water. It is a heat-giver-being nearly all starchand not a flesh-former and should therefore, as an article of food, be taken with milk.
Maize is a native American grass now grown largely in America, Africa and Southern States. In the whole ear it is called a cob and is in America roasted and eaten as a vegetable, as which it is extremely good; in its grown state it is known, when boiled, in the United States as Mush and in Italy as Polenta.
CONSTITUENT PARTS OF 1 LB. OF MAIZE.
Water ... ... ... ...
Ozs. grs. 2.140 Fibrine, &c....
Starch, &c.
Fat ... ... ... ...
Mineral Matter 1 193 11 51 MAIZE, BOILED.
A meatless vegetable soup for twelve, finished with egg yolks and vinegar, followed on the same page by a hot maitre d'hotel sauce and a reference note on maize meal.
- The hinge: the egg liaisonThe yolks and vinegar go in off the heat, at the moment of serving, and the soup must not return to the boil. Beat a ladle of the hot soup into the yolks first, then stir that back into the pan, or the yolks will scramble into threads.
- Scale and yieldThree quarts of water and 6 oz of butter serve twelve, at roughly half a pint a head before the long simmer reduces it. Halve everything for six; the 1.5 hour simmer stays the same, though a smaller pan will reduce faster, so keep it covered.
- StewpanA stewpan here is simply a wide, heavy saucepan with a lid, not a casserole dish. Use one that holds at least 5 quarts so the greens can be turned in the butter before the water goes in.
- TimingsThe method says boil gently for 1.5 hours while the summary gives 2 hours; the extra half hour covers the initial sweating and stirring of the vegetables and the preparation. Ninety minutes at a bare simmer is ample, and modern taste is often better served by 40 to 50 minutes, which keeps the spinach and lettuce from going grey.
- Bread-crustThe crusts are the thickener, standing in for a roux. The recipe asks only for 'a few pieces'; stale white bread crusts will dissolve into the broth; whizz the soup briefly if you want it smooth.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg, sold as whole blades or ground. Conversions vary, but two blades are generally reckoned as somewhere between a quarter and a half teaspoon of ground mace; added with the water and fished out before serving if whole.
- Heads of celeryA head of celery is the whole bunch, not a single rib. Four heads is a lot by current standards; two large bunches, trimmed, is closer to the intended volume of vegetable.
- Cost1s. 10d. for twelve servings is the point of the dish. This is a soup built from butter, water and whatever green is in the garden, and it was priced to prove it.
- The sauce alongsideThe maitre d'hotel sauce is a reduced ham-and-poultry stock thickened with a raw butter-and-flour paste, then finished with parsley, lemon and a little sugar. Like the soup, the recipe insists it be heated gradually and never allowed to boil once the remaining ingredients are in.
A butter-and-greens soup with no meat in it, thickened with bread and bound with egg yolk, sits comfortably in the tradition of maigre cookery: dishes made for fast days, when abstinence from flesh generally still permitted butter and eggs, though the rules varied considerably by period and place. Victorian household books carried several such soups, and the costings here show why they survived beyond religious observance, since a soup for twelve at under two shillings was simply good housekeeping. The vinegar at the end sharpens a rich, bland liquid rather than salting it further, an effect earlier cooks got from verjuice, though the recipe itself gives no reason for it. The maize note that follows sits in the book as a reference entry rather than a recipe, reflecting a confidence, current across the later Victorian period, in dividing foods into heat-givers and flesh-formers, an early and rough nutritional scheme that lumped all starches together and prescribed milk to make good the deficiency.