Home › S › Stew Soup (INGREDIENTS for dish)
Stew Soup (INGREDIENTS for dish)
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons.-2½ lbs. of beef, 5 onions, 5 turnips, lb. of rice, a large bunch of parsley, a few sweet herbs, pepper and salt, 2½ quarts of water. AVERAGE COST, 28.
Cut the beef up in small pieces, add the other ingredients, and boil gently for 2 hours. Oatmeal or potatoes would be a great improvement.
TIME.-2 hours.
SEASONABLE in winter.
A one-pot economy soup: everything goes in cold water together and simmers for two hours. The text as reprinted has lost a fraction or two, so a little judgement is needed on the rice.
- The rice quantity is ambiguousThe original reads "lb. of rice", with the fraction apparently dropped in printing. Start with 4 oz (about 1/2 cup) for 2 quarts of water — a full pound would set the whole pot solid.
- "Average cost, 2s."The figure is two shillings for the entire pot, not 28 of anything. Costings appear throughout Beeton because the book was aimed at households budgeting to the penny.
- Choose a stewing cut"2 lbs. of beef" here means cheap collagen-rich meat — shin, chuck or leg. Two hours at a bare simmer breaks that down; the same time will turn lean steak into string.
- Gentle really does mean gentleA rolling boil emulsifies the fat and clouds the broth, and the rice will disintegrate. Keep it at a lazy tremble, lid ajar, and skim the grey foam off in the first fifteen minutes.
- VegetablesFive onions and five turnips is a lot of bulk for 2 quarts. Aim for roughly 1 lb of each, cut in chunks, and add them after the first thirty minutes if you want them intact rather than dissolved.
- The parsley and sweet herbs"A large bunch" is best treated as a tied bundle of stalks that comes out at the end. "Sweet herbs" is a loose period term, usually taken to cover thyme, marjoram and the like. Save some chopped parsley leaf to stir in off the heat.
- Season at the endTwo quarts reduces noticeably over two hours, so salt once the volume has settled. If you add the suggested oatmeal or potatoes, expect to need more salt and possibly more water.
- YieldSix generous bowls as written, and it thickens overnight into something closer to a stew. Thin with water or stock when reheating.
Beeton's soup chapter divides fairly cleanly between broths meant to flatter a dinner table and soups meant to feed a household cheaply, and this belongs firmly to the second group — hence the printed cost, the winter seasoning, and the blunt note that oatmeal or potatoes "would be a great improvement," meaning more calories for no more money. Soups of this kind were also the standard output of parish and charity kitchens in Victorian Britain, where beef, root vegetables and a starch simmered in a copper fed large numbers for pennies a head; recipes titled simply "stew soup" or "cheap soup" recur across nineteenth-century household manuals. The rice and oatmeal are doing the same work as barley in other cheap soups: bulking the liquid so that two pounds of meat reads as a meal for six rather than a garnish.