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Economical Soup
1 quart stock 1 onion 1 small carrot 1 teaspoon salt Water to cover vegetables 2 cloves 2 peppercorns 1 bay leaf 1 sprig parsley Pinch of mace Leaves and root of celery stalk Chop the vegetables and cook them together with the herbs and seasoning in water sufficient to cover them. When done, add the stock and bring to a boil.
A thrift soup built on leftover stock and vegetable trimmings, with the flavourings doing all the work. A few of the quantities and habits need translating.
- StockA quart is 4 cups. Mrs. Fryer assumes homemade meat stock from the week's bones; a good unsalted commercial broth works, but hold back the teaspoon of salt until you have tasted at the end.
- "Leaves and root of celery stalk"This means the trimmings you would otherwise discard — the leafy tops and the fibrous base. Celeriac is not intended. A couple of pale inner stalks with leaves attached will substitute.
- MaceThe dried outer covering of the nutmeg seed, milder and more floral than nutmeg itself. Ground mace is still sold; a pinch is genuinely a pinch, as it turns soapy in quantity.
- Cooking timeNo time is given. The chopped onion, carrot and celery in barely enough water to cover need about 20 minutes at a simmer to be tender and to draw out the spices.
- Strain or don'tThe recipe leaves the cloves, peppercorns and bay in the pot. Tie them in muslin or fish them out before serving, or strain the whole soup for a clear broth and return the vegetables.
- Bringing to a boilAdd the stock and bring it just to the boil to marry the two liquids, then serve. Prolonged boiling after the stock goes in dulls the aromatics you have spent twenty minutes extracting.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. A quart of stock plus whatever water was needed to cover the vegetables will come to something over four cups — roughly four modest first-course servings.
"Economical" was a working category in American household cookery around 1900, not a euphemism: cookbooks of the period often offered a first-quality and a plainer version of the same dish, the latter assuming a stockpot kept going from Sunday's roast bones. This recipe is essentially a method for stretching that stock, using aromatics and trimmings — celery leaves and root, a sprig of parsley, whole spices from the cupboard — to give body and interest to a liquid that would otherwise taste thin. The spice list owes something to the French court bouillon and bouquet garni tradition that ran through nineteenth-century English and American manuals, with mace standing in for the warm note that a modern cook would more likely get from nutmeg. Mrs. Fryer's book, too, reads as a piece of domestic economy of the era: a cookbook meant to be worked from rather than shelved.