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Vegetable Soup
Fry four onions till they are brown. Add them to three pints of water, with four carrots, a slice of white crumb of bread, five potatoes, a celery and a bunch of parsley, which you must take out before passing the soup through the sieve. A few tomatoes make the soup better; if they are tinned, do not add them till after the soup has been passed through the tammy; if they are fresh, put them in with the other vegetables. Simmer for an hour, add pepper and salt before serving.
A purée soup of the plainest kind, thickened with bread rather than flour or cream. The only technique that needs translating is the sieving.
- The tammyA tammy (from tamis) is a fine cloth or hair sieve through which soup was pressed with a wooden pestle. A food mill, or a blender followed by a medium sieve, does the same work in a fraction of the time.
- Three pintsThe book is British, so these are Imperial pints: 60 fl oz, about 7¼ US cups or 1.7 litres. The vegetables release more liquid as they cook, so the finished soup is looser than it sounds.
- "A celery"A whole head of celery, not a single rib. Trim the root and the coarsest outer stalks; the leaves can go in and add a good deal of flavour.
- The breadThe slice of white crumb is the thickener — crumb only, crusts removed. Use a dense white loaf rather than soft sandwich bread, which dissolves to nothing and thickens very little.
- Frying the onionsNo fat is specified. Butter is in keeping with the book; the instruction to fry them brown is the point, since the colour and sweetness of the onions carry the whole soup. Take ten to fifteen minutes over it.
- Tinned tomatoesThe advice to hold them back is sound: tinned tomatoes are already cooked soft, so simmering and sieving them with the raw vegetables gains nothing. Stir them in after sieving and warm through.
- An hour's simmerRoot vegetables cut into rough chunks are tender in 25 to 30 minutes. A full hour will not spoil the soup, but there is nothing to gain past the point where a knife slides through the carrot.
- SeasoningSalt is added only at the end, which leaves the vegetables tasting flat. Salt the pot lightly at the start and correct after sieving. A little stock in place of some of the water improves it considerably.
- YieldRoughly 2 litres of finished soup, serving four generously as a first course.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in Britain during the First World War from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees, and sold in aid of relief work; the food it records is domestic and frugal by nature rather than by wartime accident. This soup shows the household economy plainly — no stock, no butter beyond what fries the onions, and a slice of stale bread crumb doing the job that a roux or cream would do in a restaurant kitchen. Bread as a thickener for puréed vegetable soups is very old across northern France and the Low Countries, and survives in the region's soupes and in Spanish and Italian bread soups besides. The note about tinned tomatoes is a small period marker: tinned tomatoes were common enough by 1915 that a cook could be assumed to have a tin, but distinct enough from fresh that they warranted separate handling.