Home › Blossoms for Food › Marigold Soup
Marigold Soup
Boil mutton bones 4-5 hours, cool and remove fat, add an onion with a couple of cloves stuck in, a turnip and two potatoes, peeled and sliced, and boil everything until vegetables are soft. Then remove onion and turnip and stir in 2 cups of cold boiled rice. At the finish sprinkle the top of the pot with a palmful of marigold petals, which not only give zest to this soup, but dart away from the camper's spoon like glinting goldfish and add to the gaiety of eating out in the open.
A camp stockpot recipe that assumes an all-day fire and an unhurried cook. The only step that needs real attention is the flower at the end.
- Know your marigoldThe edible flower of old cookery is Calendula officinalis, pot marigold, with flat orange or yellow ray petals. The bedding marigolds sold in garden centres are Tagetes, a different genus with a resinous flavour, and nursery plants of either kind are often treated with systemic pesticides. Use petals from plants you have grown yourself or bought as food.
- Petals go in off the heatSprinkle them over the pot at the table, not into a boiling soup. Held at a simmer they lose their colour and their faint bite, and the visual effect the recipe is after goes with them.
- Pull only the ray petalsStrip the coloured petals from the green base and discard the base, which is bitter and sticky. A palmful is roughly the yield of three or four open heads.
- Quantity of bonesNo amount is given. Two to three pounds of mutton or lamb bones to four quarts of water gives a stock with body.
- Shorten the boil if you likeThree hours at a bare simmer on a stove gets most of the flavour, and hard boiling tends to emulsify fat back into the liquid.
- Chilling the stockCooling to lift the fat means cooling properly. Get the pot down to refrigerator temperature within a couple of hours rather than leaving it out overnight, then lift the solid cap off the top.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper are not mentioned anywhere. Season after the fat is removed and again after the rice goes in, since cold rice dulls the whole pot.
- YieldAs written, with two cups of cooked rice, this feeds four to six as a main course. The rice needs only to heat through, a few minutes at most.