Home › Soups › Old Fashioned Vegetable Soup
Old Fashioned Vegetable Soup
Two pounds of beef from the shin, 2 carrots, one small yellow turnip, 2 onions, 4 potatoes, 2 parsnips. Boil meat in about four quarts of water slowly for about six hours. Put all vegetables through meat cutter, using course cutter, and add to stock, and boil about 1/2 hrs. Season to taste with salt and pepper. (Contributed.)
A long-simmered shin broth with the vegetables ground rather than diced, which is the detail that makes this soup different from any other vegetable soup. A few notes on quantities and timing.
- The hinge: grind the vegetablesPutting carrot, turnip, parsnip, onion and potato through the coarse plate of a meat grinder gives a thick, almost porridge-like body without any flour or roux. A food processor pulsed to a coarse rubble is the nearest modern equivalent; do not purée, or the potato turns gluey.
- Shin of beefBeef shin (foreshank) is still sold, often cut across as osso buco-style rounds. Ask for it bone in — the marrow and collagen are what give four quarts of water any depth. Boneless stew beef will not produce the same broth.
- Yellow turnipThis means rutabaga, called a Swede in Britain. "Small" here is roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb; a large modern rutabaga will dominate the pot.
- "Boil slowly"A bare simmer, with the surface barely moving; on a modern stove that is somewhere around 180–190F. A true rolling boil for six hours will emulsify the fat and cloud the stock. Skim the grey foam during the first half hour.
- Six hours, and the water levelSix hours is generous but not wrong for shin; four is usually enough for the meat to fall apart. Keep the pot partly covered and top up with hot water, or four quarts will reduce substantially before the vegetables go in.
- "About 1/2 hrs"Read this as half an hour. That is generous for ground roots, which cook quickly, but it does no harm; check the parsnip and rutabaga, which should be soft enough to break under a spoon.
- The meatThe recipe never says what becomes of the beef. Lift it out before adding the vegetables, strip it from the bone, chop it and return it to the pot at the end so it does not shred into threads.
- YieldRoughly two to three quarts of finished soup depending on how much you top up, serving eight to ten as a first course or six as a meal. It will thicken on standing and may need thinning with stock or water on reheating.
Church and society cook books of the early twentieth century — and the Philathea class books, produced by the young women's arm of the Baraca-Philathea Sunday school movement, are squarely of this type — were assembled from members' contributions, which is why this one ends simply "(Contributed.)" with no name attached. The recipe belongs to the era when a household meat grinder was standard equipment and was used for far more than mincing beef: nuts, cooked vegetables, leftover roasts and dried fruit all went through it. Grinding raw roots into a soup pot was a way to get thickness and even cooking out of cheap winter storage vegetables — carrot, parsnip, rutabaga, potato, onion, the standard root-cellar inventory — while a two-pound shin, one of the cheapest cuts on the animal, carried the whole thing. The "old fashioned" in the title is already nostalgic, suggesting the contributor thought of the long six-hour simmer as something her mother's generation did.