Turnip Soup
INGREDIENTS for soup for 8 or 10 persons.-3 oz. of butter, 9 good-sized turnips, 4 onions, 2 quarts of cheap stock, seasoning to taste. AVERAGE CosT, 1s. 6d.
Melt the butter in the stewpan, but do not let it boil; wash, drain and slice the turnips and onions very thin; put them in the butter with a teacupful of stock, and stew very gently for an hour. Then add the remainder of the stock, and simmer for another hour. Rub it through a tammy, put it back into the stewpan, but do not let it boil. Serve very hot.
TIME.-2 hours.
SEASONABLE from October to March.
Note. By adding a little cream, this soup will be much improved.
A plain purée soup that depends entirely on the slow butter stew at the start. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the instructions are easy to skip and both matter.
- The hinge: stew, do not fryThe butter is melted but never allowed to boil, and the vegetables cook an hour with only a teacupful of stock. That is a sweat, not a sauté: the turnips must soften and sweeten without taking any colour. Browning turns the finished soup grey-beige and gives it a cabbagey edge.
- Turnip quantity"9 good-sized turnips" almost certainly means white turnips rather than swede, though the recipe is marked seasonable October to March, so these would be stored winter roots. Nine good-sized ones will come to something in the region of 2 1/2 to 3 lb peeled. If you use swede or rutabaga the soup will be sweeter and more orange, and closer to a different dish.
- Liquid measuresTwo imperial quarts is about 9 1/2 US cups (2.27 litres). A teacupful in Beeton is conventionally taken as about 5 fl oz, a generous half cup.
- Cheap stockBeeton's "cheap stock" is the economical household sort, built on bones, trimmings and root vegetables rather than fresh meat. Any unsalted light chicken or vegetable stock does the job; season at the end, since a reduced modern stock can be salty enough on its own.
- TammyA tammy was a worsted straining cloth through which soup was forced, usually by rubbing with a wooden spoon. A blender followed by a medium sieve gives a smoother result in a fraction of the time.
- Do not boil at the finishAfter sieving, the soup is reheated but held below a boil, as the recipe directs. Boiling a butter-rich turnip pur he you have added the cream from the note it can separate.
- Seasoning"Seasoning to taste" is left open; salt and pepper are what is meant, and white pepper keeps a pale soup pale. Turnip takes kindly to a pinch of sugar if the roots are old and peppery, and to a scrape of nutmeg.
- Yield and servingAs written it fills 8 to 10 first-course bowls. It is thin by modern standards; a single peeled potato stewed with the turnips will give it more body without altering the character.
Turnip soup belongs to the long English tradition of "cheap" pur he soups built on a root vegetable, a little butter and whatever stock the kitchen already had on the stove. Beeton prices it at 1s. 6d. for eight or ten people and marks it seasonable October to March, which is much of the point of the recipe: turnips stored well through the winter, cost almost nothing, and could be stretched with cheap stock into something that came to the table hot and looked like a proper first course. The note about cream is in keeping with her practice elsewhere in the soup chapter, where a frugal base is offered plain for everyday use and enriched for company. Turnips were a staple of British field agriculture from the eighteenth century onward, grown in rotation as winter fodder as much as for the table, which may be part of why they carried a faint reputation as humble food.