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Carrot Soup (WITHOUT MEAT Take four or five)
252. CARROT SOUP (WITHOUT MEAT). Take four or five large carrots, one turnip, three onions, and three heads of celery shred fine ; put into a stew-pan with a quarter of a pound of butter, three cloves, some peppercorns, and a blade of mace; stir till it is a pulp ; add half a pint of peas boiled to a pulp, two anchovies, and three quarts of quarts of water; let it simmer two hours, and rub through a hair sieve. If not thick enough, add a little flour and butter.
Another.-Slice two good-sized carrots, two large onions, one large turnip, and one stick of celery; dredge flour over them and fry till tender, with just butter enough to keep them from burning; put them in a stewpan, and pour enough boiling water to cover them. Stew them about four hours, and when half done add boiling water to make the proper thickness. Mash and strain through a sieve, and season with pepper and salt. If approved of, add a little cream. Another Carrot Soup. - Take one turnip, two or three onions, and twelve carrots; boil them in some stock till quite tender, then rub them through a hair-sieve. Season with peppercorns and salt, if salt, if necessary, and thicken with a little flour and butter. 253. CARROT SOUP (WITH MEAT). -Put some beef-bones with four quarts of the liquor in which a leg of mutton or beef has been boiled , two large onions, a turnip, pepper, and salt, into a saucepan, and stew for three hours. Have ready six large carrots scraped and cut thin, strain the soup on them, and stew till soft enough to pulp through a hair-sieve or coarse cloth, then boil the pulp with the soup, which is to be as thick as pea-soup. Use two wooden spoons to rub the carrots through the sieve, and pulp only the red part of the carrot, not the yellow. Make the soup the day before, and add cayenne to the palate. 254. CARROT SOUP (WITH CREAM). -To the liquor that a knuckle of veal has been boiled in, add twelve large carrots; boil till the carrots will mash through a sieve, put them through, and then let them boil in the broth till quite smooth; add half a pint of cream and a little salt.
It should be boiled till smooth, and of the consistence of pea-soup. Or, the stock may be made of one pound and a half of scrag of mutton, stewed in three quarts of water
Four related Victorian carrot soups, ranging from a meatless pulp thickened with dried peas to a cream version built on veal stock. The method is the same throughout: sweat or fry the roots, cook them soft, then force them through a sieve — which a blender now does in seconds.
- The hinge: cook the carrots to collapseAll four versions depend on the vegetables being genuinely soft before they are pushed through the sieve; under-cooked carrot gives a gritty, fibrous soup that no amount of straining fixes. Test with the back of a spoon rather than trusting the stated times.
- Ignore the long simmersTwo hours in the first version and four in the second reflect coal ranges and a desire to reduce; sliced carrot and onion are soft in 25-35 minutes. Extended boiling flattens carrot flavour and turns the sweetness dull.
- Hair sieveA horsehair sieve was the fine-mesh strainer of the period, used with two wooden spoons as the recipe describes. A food processor or stick blender followed by a pass through a fine chinois gives a smoother result with far less work.
- Quantities and unitsHalf a pint here is the imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz or a generous cup and a quarter; a quarter pound of butter is 4 oz / 115 g, which is a lot of fat for four or five carrots and can be halved. "Three heads of celery" means three whole plants, not three stalks; that is a great deal of celery for the pot, and cutting it back to a few stalks is the safer course.
- Peas boiled to a pulpMost likely dried peas rather than fresh garden peas, and in either case they are there as the thickener. Cook them separately until they fall apart before adding, or they will stay firm in the finished soup.
- Anchovies as seasoningTwo anchovies in a meatless soup supply the savoury depth that stock would otherwise give. Salted fillets or a teaspoon of anchovy paste both work; add them early so they dissolve, and hold back on salt until the end.
- Red part onlyThe instruction to pulp the red outer flesh and discard the yellow core applies to older carrot varieties with a tough, pale, comparatively flavourless heart. Modern carrots are uniform and need no such sorting.
- Blade of maceA blade is one piece of the dried outer covering of nutmeg, not ground mace. A quarter teaspoon of ground mace substitutes, though it will not strain out and slightly clouds the soup.
- YieldThe meatless version, with three quarts of liquid, makes roughly eight to ten servings; the beef-bone version at four quarts rather more. All reheat well, and the note about making the soup a day ahead is sound advice for the flavour.
Carrot soup was one of the standard "cheap" soups of nineteenth-century British cookery, and the presence of several variants in a single sequence shows how the same dish was scaled up and down the household economy: no meat at all, then a version built on the water a leg of mutton had boiled in, then one on veal knuckle broth with cream. The liquor from boiled joints was treated as a stock in its own right, and a soup like this was one way of using it. The direction to pulp only the red part of the carrot is a small window onto the period's produce: the field carrots of the day had a fibrous pale core, a distinction that faded as sweeter, evenly coloured varieties took over the market. Thickening with a little flour and butter is offered almost as an afterthought in two of the versions here.