Portable Soup
By reducing ver very strong stock almost to a glaze, and forming it into little cakes, which should be perfectly dry, and stowed in tin canisters, portable soup can be made at home; but the many good preparations sold for the purpose save a great deal of trouble and answer excellently well. Johnson's fluid beef is one of the pleasantest, either simply POTATO CAKE. made with water, or better still with some simple vegetable stock.
Note. The desiccated soup made by F. King and Co., also answers the same purpose as this, as a very small packet will make a good quantity of nice soup.
Potage à la bonne femme.- INGREDIENTS for soup for 4 or 5 persons.- 1½ pint of white stock, 1 gill of new milk, 1 oz. of butter, a lettuce, an onion, a very small cucumber, the yolks of 2 eggs, a pinch of sugar, a handful of sorrel, a little chervil and tarragon, a French roll, salt, nutmeg.
AVERAGE COST, 1s. 9d.
Shred the vegetables, and put the onion in a saucepan with the butter, but do not brown it; add the vegetables to the onion, and stir them over a slow fire for 10 minutes. Put in the seasoning and stock boiling, and boil for another 10 minutes; then, when cool, add the yolks of the eggs and the milk. Cut the roll in thin slices, dry them in the oven, then put them in a tureen and pour the soup over.
TIME.- an hour.
SEASONABLE in spring or early summer.
Two things are jumbled together on this page by the printer: a short note on portable soup, and a full recipe for potage à la bonne femme. The stray words "POTATO CAKE" are a running head from the facing column and belong to neither.
- What portable soup actually isStrong gelatinous stock boiled down to a stiff glaze, cast in small cakes and dried hard, then stored airtight. It is the ancestor of the stock cube; a good reduced glace de viande frozen in an ice-cube tray does the same job with less risk of spoilage than tin canisters in a warm cupboard.
- Johnson's fluid beef and desiccated soupBoth were branded commercial products of the later nineteenth century; Johnston's Fluid Beef (usually spelt with the 't') was the product later sold as Bovril. Substitute any concentrated beef extract or a good bouillon paste, and taste before salting, since these are far saltier than homemade glaze.
- A gillIn this British book, a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, or roughly two-thirds of a US cup. "New milk" simply means fresh whole milk, not skimmed or soured.
- White stockUnbrowned veal or chicken stock, made without roasting the bones, so the finished soup stays pale. Use unsalted stock: the egg-and-milk liaison and the dried bread both dull seasoning, and you will want to correct salt at the end.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the yolks and milk go in, the soup must never boil or it will curdle into scrambled egg. Let the soup drop to about 150F, whisk a ladleful into the beaten yolks and milk, return it to the pan and bring it back only to about 175F over low heat, stirring. "When cool" in the original means cooled below boiling, not cold.
- Sorrel, chervil, tarragonSorrel is the point of the soup and gives the sharpness; spinach plus a squeeze of lemon is the usual stand-in. Fresh chervil and tarragon are worth seeking out, but add them near the end, as long cooking flattens both.
- The lettuce and cucumberA firm cos or romaine, shredded, and a small ridge cucumber, peeled and seeded. Ten minutes of sweating in butter over low heat should soften them without colouring the onion at all.
- The French rollA small crusty white roll, sliced thin and dried in a low oven until crisp but barely coloured; the book gives no temperature or time. Put the slices in the warmed tureen and pour the soup over at the table so they keep some texture.
- Yield and timingServes 4 or 5 as a first course. The stated "TIME: an hour" assumes the white stock is already made; active cooking is about 25 minutes.
Portable soup was provisioning technology before it was a convenience food: cakes of dried meat glaze, sometimes called "pocket soup" or "veal glue", were carried by eighteenth-century travellers, armies and ships, and Captain Cook's victualling for the second voyage is generally cited as its most famous use. By the time this edition of Beeton appeared, the household labour of reducing stock to a glaze had been overtaken by branded meat extracts, and the note here is really an admission of that: Mrs Beeton's revisers simply recommend Johnson's Fluid Beef, the product usually traced to the Scottish butcher John Lawson Johnston and later sold as Bovril. The soup that follows belongs to an older and gentler tradition. Potage \\