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Vegetable Soup
Scrape 2 carrots, an onion, ¼ head cabbage and 2 turnips chopped fine; boil 1 hour with water enough to cover and 1 tablespoon butter; prepare 2 large potatoes the same way. Take some meat stock (with all the grease taken off); boil all together ½ hour, season to taste.
A frugal stock-and-root-vegetable soup with no quantities for the liquid, which is the one thing worth pinning down before you start.
- Meat stock quantityThe recipe never says how much. For 2 carrots, 2 turnips, an onion, a quarter cabbage and 2 potatoes, figure 6 to 8 cups of stock; less and it becomes a stewed vegetable dish rather than soup.
- "Grease taken off"Chill the stock so the fat sets in a solid cap and lift it off. Period cookbooks describe skimming hot stock with a spoon, sometimes drawing paper across the surface to absorb the last of the fat; refrigeration does it more thoroughly.
- The potatoes go in separately"Prepare 2 large potatoes the same way" most likely means chopped fine and cooked in their own water, though the text does not say for how long. Cook them separately and add them cooked; raw potato added to the finished pot stays starchy and clouds the broth, and a full hour with the roots will leave them very soft.
- Total cooking timeAn hour for chopped carrot, turnip and cabbage, then another half hour with the stock, is far past done by modern taste. Twenty to twenty-five minutes on the vegetables is enough, and the cabbage in particular turns sulphurous past that point.
- Butter as the only fatThe recipe gives no reason for the single tablespoon in the vegetable water; it adds a little richness and carries flavour. Sweating the onion, carrot and turnip in that butter first, before any water goes in, gives a noticeably better soup for no extra work.
- Seasoning"Season to taste" in recipes of this kind usually meant little more than salt and pepper; add salt last, since the stock reduces. A bay leaf, thyme, or a spoonful of chopped parsley at the end would not be out of place for the period.
- YieldAbout six generous bowls, or eight as a first course.
Recipes titled simply "Vegetable Soup" appear in many American community and household cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and they are less dishes than instructions for using things up: yesterday's stock pot, the last quarter of a cabbage, roots from the cellar. The reliance on meat stock rather than water is the mark of a kitchen where bones and trimmings were simmered as a matter of routine, so that a soup like this cost only vegetables and a stretch of attention at the stove. The insistence on removing every trace of grease reflects a genuine period preoccupation: cookbooks of the era return again and again to the idea that a clear, fat-free broth is the sign of a careful cook, and greasy soup the sign of a careless one. Carrot, turnip, onion and cabbage were the standard winter quartet in northern kitchens, available from storage long after the growing season had ended.