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Vegetable Soup (INGREDIENTS for soup) (II)
INGREDIENTS for soup for 8 or 10 persons.-Equal quantities of onions, carrots, turnips; 1/4 lb. of butter, a crust of toasted bread, 1 head of celery, 1 faggot of herbs, salt and pepper to taste, 1 teaspoonful of powdered sugar, 2 quarts of common stock or boiling water.
Allow 3/4 lb. of vegetables to 2 quarts of stock.
AVERAGE COST, 6d. per quart.
Cut up the onions, carrots and turnips; wash and drain them well, and put them in the stewpan with the butter and powdered sugar. Toss the whole over a sharp fire for 10 minutes, but do not let them brown, or you will spoil the flavour of the soup.
When done, pour the stock or boiling water on them; add the bread, celery, herbs and seasoning; stew for 3 1/2 hours; skim well and strain it off. When ready to serve, add a little sliced carrot, celery and turnip, and flavour with a spoonful of Harvey's sauce, or a little ketchup, TIME.-3 hours.
SEASONABLE all the year.
Vegetable Soup. (Good and Cheap, made without Meat.) - INGREDIENTS for large quantity of soup. -6 potatoes, 4 turnips, or 2 if very large; 2 carrots, 2 onions; if obtainable, 2 mushrooms; 1 head of celery, 1 large slice of bread, 1 small saltspoonful of salt, 1/4 saltspoonful of ground black pepper, 2 teaspoonfuls of Harvey's sauce, 6 quarts of water. AVERAGE COST, about 1d. per quart.
Peel the vegetables, and cut them up into small pieces; toast the bread rather brown, and put all into a stewpan with the water and seasoning. Simmer gently for 3 hours, or until all is reduced to a pulp, and pass VEGETABLES, CUT. it through a sieve in the same way as pea-soup, which it should resemble in consistence; but it should be a dark brown colour. Warm it up again when required; put in the Harvey's sauce, and, if necessary, add to the flavouring.
TIME.-3 hours, or rather more.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Vegetables, Cut, for Soups, &c.
The annexed engraving represents a cutter for shaping vegetables for soups, ragoûts, stews, &c.; carrots and turnips being the usual vegetables for which this utensil is used. Cut the vegetables into slices about 4inch in thickness, stamp them out with the cutter, and boil them for a few minutes in salt and water, until tender. Turnips should VEGETABLE-CUTTER. be cut in rather thicker slices than carrots, on account of the former boiling more quickly to a pulp than the latter.
Note.-Cut vegetables for soup can be bought dried and in a smali compass. They are prepared by Chollet and Co.
Two versions of vegetable soup sit here side by side: a buttery stock-based one that is sweated, stewed and strained, and a meatless one simmered to a pulp and sieved. Both hinge on the same instruction — sweat the roots in fat without letting them colour, because browning changes the soup entirely.
- The butter quantity looks wrongA pound of butter to two quarts of stock and the 3/4 lb of vegetables the recipe itself specifies is far outside normal proportion for this style of soup, and reads like a misprint for 1/4 lb. Treat the figure as unreliable and start with 2-4 oz.
- Faggot of herbsA small bundle of parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string — a bouquet garni. Tie it so it can be lifted out, though here everything is strained anyway.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon holds roughly a quarter of a teaspoon, so the second soup is seasoned with about 1/4 teaspoon of salt and a pinch of pepper for six quarts. That is very light by modern taste; season at the end instead.
- Harvey's sauceA bottled Victorian condiment based on anchovy, soy, vinegar, garlic and spice, now hard to find. Worcestershire sauce is the closest thing on a modern shelf; use a teaspoon at a time, as apart from the mushrooms and the toasted bread it supplies most of the savoury depth in the meatless version.
- Sharp fire, 10 minutes"Sharp" here means brisk but controlled: medium-high heat with the pan lid off and constant tossing. The recipe explicitly warns against browning, so the sugar is there for flavour rather than caramelising; pull back the heat the moment any edge starts to take colour.
- Three hours is for extraction, not tendernessThe long stew exists because everything is strained or sieved; nothing needs to stay intact. If you want a fresher soup, ninety minutes gives you most of the flavour with less of the flat, stewed note.
- Passing it through a sieveThe second soup is meant to end up the consistency of pea soup. A food mill or a blender followed by a sieve does in two minutes what a wooden spoon and a hair sieve did in twenty; the bread, toasted "rather brown", probably accounts for much of the body and of the dark colour the recipe calls for.
- Yield and costThe first makes 2 quarts, which the recipe puts at 8 or 10 persons; the second starts from 6 quarts of water and is described only as a "large quantity". The prices -- 6d. and 1d. per quart -- are pre-decimal British pennies and are the point of the second recipe's title.
- Cut vegetables for garnishThe sliced carrot, celery and turnip added at the end should be cut about a quarter of an inch thick and blanched separately in salted water until just tender. Turnip cooks faster than carrot, so cut it thicker or boil the two in separate pans.
Beeton's household books often give two grades of the same dish, and vegetable soup is a clear case: one built on "common stock" with a generous lump of butter for a family that keeps a stockpot, and one "good and cheap, made without meat" costing about a penny a quart, which put a hot dinner within reach of a household with no meat money at all. Both lean on bottled sauce for savour — Harvey's, an anchovy-and-soy condiment generally said to have been sold in London from the late eighteenth century, was the standard Victorian shortcut to depth of flavour. The closing note advertising dried cut vegetables "in a small compass" from Chollet and Co. is a glimpse of the new industrial pantry: compressed dehydrated vegetables were developed for ships and armies in the mid-nineteenth century and were beginning to be offered to domestic kitchens as well.