Turkish Soup
5 cups Brown Soup Stock 2 slices onion 1/4 cup rice 10 peppercorns 1½ cups stewed and strained ¼ teaspoon celery salt tomatoes 2 tablespoons butter Bit of bay leaf 1½ tablespoons flour Cook rice in Brown Stock until soft. Cook bay leaf, onion, peppercorns, and celery salt with tomatoes thirty minutes. Combine mixtures, rub through sieve, and bind with butter and flour cooked together. Season with salt and pepper if needed.
The ingredient list was printed in two columns and has run together in transcription; read it as 5 cups brown soup stock, 1/4 cup rice, 1 1/2 cups stewed and strained tomatoes, 2 tablespoons butter, 1 1/2 tablespoons flour, 2 slices onion, 10 peppercorns, 1/4 teaspoon celery salt, and a bit of bay leaf. It is a purée thickened twice over, by starch from the rice and by a roux.
- The hinge: sieve after the rice is fully softThe rice is not a garnish, it is the body of the soup. Simmer it in the stock until the grains are collapsing, 25 to 30 minutes, or the purée will be gritty rather than velvety.
- Brown soup stockFarmer's brown stock is beef shin and marrow bone browned before simmering. A good unsalted beef stock stands in; if using commercial stock, hold back all added salt until the end, since the celery salt and reduction both concentrate.
- Stewed and strained tomatoesIn this period this meant tomatoes cooked down and pushed through a sieve to remove skin and seed, closer to modern passata than to canned diced tomatoes. About one 14 oz can, blitzed and strained, gives roughly the 1 1/2 cups wanted.
- "A bit of bay leaf"Half a dried leaf. A whole one over thirty minutes in only 1 1/2 cups of tomato will dominate the finished soup.
- Peppercorns and onionBoth are aromatics to be removed, not eaten. The peppercorns will not pass a sieve, but a food mill or blender will crush them and make the soup harsh; fish them out first, or tie them with the bay in a scrap of cloth.
- Sieve or blenderA blender does in a minute what the original expects of a wooden spoon and a hair sieve. Pass it through a fine strainer afterward anyway for the tomato skin the original recipe's straining step assumed had already gone.
- Binding with butter and flourCook the 2 tablespoons butter and 1 1/2 tablespoons flour together for two or three minutes to lose the raw taste, then whisk in a ladle of the hot soup before returning it to the pot. Simmer five minutes more so the flour thickens fully.
- YieldAbout six cups, serving four to six as a first course. It reheats well but thickens further overnight; loosen with stock, not water.
Nineteenth-century cookbooks attached "Turkish" to a broad range of dishes with only loose reference to Turkey, and this one earns the name chiefly through rice and tomato, both fixtures of Ottoman cookery. Fannie Farmer's soup chapter is organised as a system rather than a collection: a handful of base stocks, then dozens of variations built on them, so that Turkish Soup, Mock Bisque and the rest are permutations of the brown and white stocks taught at the front of the section. The rice-and-roux double thickening is characteristic of the school's teaching, which favoured soups smooth enough to show no trace of what went into them, the labour of rubbing everything through a sieve being taken for granted.