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Vegetable Soup with Stock
Cut three onions, three turnips, one carrot and four potatoes. Put them into a stew-pan with two tablespoonfuls of butter and a teaspoonful of powdered sugar. After it has cooked ten minutes, add two quarts of stock, and when it comes to a boil put aside to simmer until the vegetables are tender-about onehalf hour
A straightforward sweated-vegetable soup that depends entirely on the stock you start with. The original assumes a stockpot already going on the back of the range; that is the only real obstacle.
- The stock is the recipeTwo quarts of unseasoned homemade stock, beef or veal in this period, carries all the flavour here. Commercial broth works but is usually salty, so hold back on additional salt until the vegetables are tender.
- Sizes are unstatedAssume medium vegetables: very roughly 3 cups onion, 3 cups diced turnip, under a cup of carrot and 4 cups potato, with a good deal of variation depending on what you buy. Cut everything to a similar dice so it finishes together in the half hour given.
- "Cut" means dice, not slice thinThe vegetables need to survive ten minutes in butter and another thirty in liquid. A half-inch dice holds; thin slices collapse into a purée, which is not what the timing intends.
- The sugar and butter are doing workA teaspoon of powdered (superfine) sugar over the onions and turnips in butter encourages light browning and takes the sharp edge off the turnip. Keep the heat moderate for those ten minutes; scorched sugar turns the whole pot bitter.
- Stew-panAny heavy saucepan or Dutch oven of about six quarts. It needs to hold two quarts of stock plus several pounds of vegetables with room to simmer.
- Simmer, do not boil"Put aside to simmer" meant sliding the pan to a cooler part of the range. On a gas or electric hob that is the lowest setting with a bare tremble at the surface; a rolling boil will break the potatoes down and cloud the soup.
- SeasoningThe original gives none beyond the sugar. Salt, pepper and a bay leaf are consistent with the period and the soup wants them.
- YieldCloser to four quarts than to two and a half, once the volume of vegetables is added to the stock; enough for a large table.
Recipes like this one belong to the era when a household stockpot was permanent equipment rather than an occasional project: bones, trimmings and vegetable ends went in continuously, and a cook drew off stock for soups, sauces and gravies as needed. The title, "Vegetable Soup with Stock," suggests a distinction from vegetable soup made with water alone, the cheaper meatless version. Manuals of this kind tended to be terse in exactly this way, assuming the reader knew what a medium turnip looked like and where on the range the cool spot was. Butter and a little sugar with root vegetables is a technique associated with French glazing.