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Mushroom Cream Soup
On a good white stock foundation, for which you have used milk and a bone of veal, sprinkle in some ground rice till it thickens, stirring it well for twenty minutes. Wash and chop your mushrooms, and fry them in butter. Add the yolk of an egg and bind it. This is a delicious soup. The Soldiers' Vegetable Soup (Eight to ten persons) Peel three pounds of vegetables. Put them in a large pot with all the vegetables that you can find, according to the season. In the winter you will take four celeries, four leeks, two turnips, a cabbage, two onions, pepper and salt, two-penny-worth of bones, and about five and one-half quarts of water. Let it all boil for three hours, taking care to add water so as to keep the quantity at five quarts. Rub all the vegetables through a tammy, crushing them well, and then let them boil up again for at least another hour. The time allotted for the first and second cooking is of the greatest importance.
Two recipes have run together on this page: a short mushroom cream soup and the longer Soldiers' Vegetable Soup that follows it. Both are written for a cook who already knows what a stock pot looks like, and both leave out quantities you will want to settle before you start.
- The hinge: the egg yolkOnce the yolk goes in the soup must not boil, or it will scramble into threads. Take the pan off the heat, temper the yolk with a ladle of hot soup, stir it back in, and hold the soup below a simmer from then on.
- White stock with milkThe foundation is a light veal stock made with milk, not a brown stock. A knuckle or shin bone of veal simmered with an onion and a bay leaf, then let down with whole milk, gives the pale body wanted; the recipe states no proportion, so judge it by eye. Chicken stock is an acceptable stand-in.
- Ground riceGround rice is rice milled to a fine grain; in British usage it is a shade coarser than rice flour, though rice flour will serve. Rain it in slowly while whisking or it will lump. About 2 tablespoons per quart thickens lightly; the twenty minutes of stirring will also cook the starch through so it does not taste raw.
- MushroomsField or cremini mushrooms fried hard in butter until the water has gone and the edges colour will carry far more flavour than mushrooms merely softened. Do not crowd the pan. Reserve a few slices whole for the top; the rest can be blended in.
- Quantities and yieldThe original gives none for the cream soup. As a working proportion, 1 lb mushrooms, 3 tablespoons butter, 2 quarts stock-and-milk and 4 tablespoons rice flour will serve six, with one yolk to bind.
- The vegetable soup: "three pounds of vegetables"This appears to be the potatoes or root base, with the listed winter vegetables added on top; the text is genuinely ambiguous. The listed items alone come to roughly 5-6 lb of trimmed vegetables, which suits five quarts of water.
- "Two-penny-worth of bones"A shopkeeper's measure with no modern equivalent. A pound or two of beef or veal marrow bones is probably about right: enough to give the water some savour without turning it into a meat broth.
- TammyA tammy is a fine woollen or canvas straining cloth; the vegetables were pushed through it with a wooden pestle. A food mill or a stiff sieve and a ladle does the same work, and a blender does it faster, though a mill keeps a better texture.
- Why the long second boilThe recipe insists on the timing but never says why. A purée only just sieved can still taste of separate vegetables, and the extra hour would marry them and cook out any raw-starch edge. Stir often once it has thickened, since a purée this heavy will catch on the bottom.
The Belgian Cook Book was published in 1915, compiled from recipes contributed by Belgians who had left the country during the occupation, many of them refugees in Britain, and sold in aid of relief work -- which is why a delicate mushroom cream soup sits directly beside something called the Soldiers' Vegetable Soup. The second recipe reads like a field kitchen formula in domestic dress: bought bones by the pennyworth, whatever vegetables the season yields, five quarts to feed eight or ten, and an insistence on long cooking rather than on any ingredient in particular. Ground rice was a familiar soup thickener in nineteenth-century British cookery, valued for thickening without the floury taste of a roux and without clouding a white stock. The pairing of the two recipes on one page is a fair picture of wartime cookery writing, which moved between remembered luxury and present scarcity without much comment.