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Vegetable Soup (INGREDIENTS for soup)
INGREDIENTS for soup for 8 or 10 persons. -7 oz. of carrot, 10 oz. of parsnip, 10 oz. of potato, cut into thin slices: 1 1/4 oz. of butter, 5 teaspoonfuls of flour, 1 teaspoonful of made mustard, salt and pepper to taste, the yolks of 2 eggs, rather more than 2 quarts of water. AVERAGE COST, 8d.
Boil the vegetables in the water 2 1/2 hours; stir them often, and if the water boils away too quickly, add more, as there should be 2 quarts of soup when done. Mix up in a basin the butter and flour, mustard, salt and pepper, with a teacupful of cold water; stir in the soup, and boil 10 minutes. Have ready the yolks of the eggs in the tureen; pour on, stir well, and serve.
TIME.-3 hours.
SEASONABLE in winter.
A plain root-vegetable soup thickened with a butter-and-flour paste and finished with egg yolks. Two of the figures in the original text are out of range and need judgement rather than blind following.
- The butter figureFourteen ounces of butter against the 27 oz (nearly 1¾ lb) of vegetables is far out of proportion for a Victorian household soup of this class, and the paste is only a thickener. Around 1½ oz (45 g), rubbed with the 5 teaspoons of flour, gives the intended body for 2 quarts.
- The boiling timeThe stated total time is 3 hours, so the vegetables cannot be boiled for anything like a full day. Sliced thin, carrot, parsnip and potato are soft in 30–40 minutes; simmer until they collapse, which is what gives the soup its texture, then proceed.
- Imperial quartsA British quart is 40 fl oz, so "rather more than 2 quarts" is about 2.5 litres of water, reducing to 2.3 litres of finished soup. Top up during the simmer if it drops below that.
- The vegetables7 oz carrot is about 200 g, 10 oz parsnip and 10 oz potato about 285 g each. Use a floury potato; it breaks down and does much of the thickening on its own.
- Made mustard"Made" mustard is the prepared wet condiment, not the dry powder — English mustard from a jar is the direct equivalent. A single teaspoon in 2 quarts is a background note, not a flavour you should taste outright.
- The liaisonBeat the yolks in the tureen, then pour the soup on in a thin stream while stirring, or ladle a little hot soup into the yolks first. Adding yolks to soup still on the heat will scramble them; the tureen method exists precisely to avoid that.
- TextureAs written the soup is left chunky. Pressing it through a sieve or giving it a short blitz before the butter-and-flour goes in produces a smoother result.
- YieldThe stated 8 to 10 servings assumes soup as one course among several. As a main course with bread it feeds 5 or 6.
Mrs Beeton's soups are graded by cost as much as by season, and eightpence for eight or ten people puts this among the cheaper soups in the book wo eeggs, with no stock at all.