Julienne Soup
1 quart stock 1 small onion small carrot 1 small tomato 1 small turnip 1 small potato 1 quart boiling water 1 tablespoon barley Salt and pepper Cut the vegetables into small pieces, add the water, barley and seasoning and let all simmer slowly until the vegetables are tender. Add the stock; bring to a boil and serve.
A thin vegetable soup built on stock, with the vegetables cooked separately in water first. Straightforward, but the cut and the barley both need attention.
- What julienne means hereThe name refers to the knife work: vegetables cut into matchsticks roughly 1/8 inch square and an inch or two long. "Small pieces" in the original is shorthand for that cut, and the soup looks and eats quite differently if you dice instead.
- Barley timingPearl barley takes 40-50 minutes to soften; matchstick carrot and turnip take 10-15, potato less. Start the barley in the quart of water alone, then add the vegetables for the last stretch so they hold their shape rather than dissolving.
- The tomato goes in lastIt collapses quickly, and a very acid one can keep the other vegetables from softening. Peel and seed it, and add it a few minutes before the stock.
- StockThe book says only 'stock', leaving the kind to the cook. Because the vegetable water is not drained off, the stock ends up diluted with roughly its own volume of water, so use a well-flavoured one and expect to season again at the end.
- Skim and season at the finishSalt after the stock is in, not before, since the reduction of the vegetable water concentrates whatever you have already added.
- YieldA little under two quarts after simmering, serving six as a first course. It is meant to be a clear, brothy soup, not a thick one.
Julienne soup was a fixture of American and British household cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, borrowed from French practice where julienne denotes the fine matchstick cut rather than any particular list of vegetables; the term is generally traced to French kitchen usage of the eighteenth century, though the origin of the name itself is unsettled. Its appeal to a cook of Mrs. Fryer's era was economy and appearance at once: it used up a small quantity of whatever root vegetables were on hand, stretched a quart of stock into a course for a table of six, and looked deliberate rather than thrifty because the cutting was so precise.