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Vegetable Soup
½ cups potato 1½ onion 1 quart water 5 tablespoons butter ½ tablespoon finely chopped parsley Salt and pepper Wash and scrape a small carrot; cut in quarters lengthwise; cut quarters in thirds lengthwise; cut strips thus made in thin slices crosswise. Wash and pare half a turnip, and cut and slice same as carrot. Wash, pare, and cut potatoes in small pieces. Wash and scrape celery and cut in quarter-inch pieces. Prepare vegetables before measuring. Cut onion in thin slices. Mix vegetables (except potatoes), and cook ten minutes, in four tablespoons butter, stirring constantly. Add potatoes, cover, and cook two minutes. Add water, and boil one hour or until vegetables are soft. Add remaining butter and parsley. Season with salt and pepper.
A stockless soup that gets its body from vegetables sweated in butter rather than from meat broth. The printed ingredient list here is incomplete — carrot, turnip and celery appear in the method but not in the measurements — so treat the quantities as a guide.
- The missing quantitiesThe method calls for a small carrot, half a turnip and celery, none of which appear in the measurements, and the onion quantity as printed ("1½ onion") is garbled. Roughly ½ cup each of sliced carrot, turnip and celery would balance the 1½ cups of potato, but what the printed line was meant to say cannot be recovered from the text.
- Prepare before measuringThe instruction to cut vegetables before measuring is not incidental: the proportions assume cup measures of prepared, sliced vegetables rather than whole or roughly broken roots.
- The hinge is the ten-minute sweatCooking the vegetables in butter with constant stirring before any water goes in is what gives this soup flavour in the absence of stock. Keep the heat moderate so nothing browns; scorched butter will carry through the whole quart.
- Potatoes go in lateThey are added for only two minutes in the butter because their starch catches and sticks readily. Covering the pan for those two minutes steams them rather than frying them.
- An hour is a long boilA full hour at a rolling boil will reduce the quart noticeably and turn the carrot and turnip to mush. A gentle simmer of 30 to 40 minutes gets the vegetables soft; top up with water if the level drops much.
- Butter off the heatThe last tablespoon of butter and the parsley go in at the end. Stir the butter in with the pan off the burner so it emulsifies into the broth instead of separating into slicks.
- YieldAbout a quart, which is two generous bowls or four small first-course servings. Five tablespoons of butter in a quart of soup is rich by modern habit; three is enough if you prefer.
A chapter of stockless soups answered a practical problem in the nineteenth-century household: stock meant a stockpot kept going for days, which suited a kitchen with a coal range always warm and suited nobody without one. These soups build flavour from butter and vegetables alone, a technique French cookery calls sweating. The fussy cutting instructions hen thirds, then thin crosswise slices eaching precise, repeatable method to cooks who had learned by watching rather than by measuring.