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Julienne Soup
256. Take some carrots, turnips, a few heads of celery, and a very few leeks and onions, cut them in fillets an inch long, and the size of a wooden skewer; then take two ounces of butter, and a little brown sugar, and lay it at the bottom of the stewpan, with the roots over; fry them over a slow fire, stirring gently; moisten them with veal broth or a quart of water: let them boil on the corner of a stove; skim all the fat off, and add a quart or two of clear soup. In summer add green peas, asparagus-tops, French-beans, some lettuce or sorrel.
A classic clear vegetable soup whose whole character rests on the knife work and on a patient, unbrowned sweating of the roots. The recipe assumes a stock pot already going, so the quantities to watch are the vegetables, not the liquid.
- The cut is the dishJulienne here means matchsticks about an inch long and the thickness of a wooden skewer, roughly 2-3 mm square. Uniformity matters more than speed: unevenly cut roots will give you both mush and raw crunch in the same spoonful.
- Fillets"Cut them in fillets" is period usage for cut into thin strips, not anything to do with fish or boning.
- Stewpan and slow fireA stewpan is a wide, straight-sided saucepan; use a heavy pan broad enough to hold the vegetables in a shallow layer. "A slow fire" means the lowest steady heat you can manage, and "the corner of a stove" the coolest part of the range - a bare simmer, not a boil.
- Butter and sugarTwo ounces is 4 tablespoons (55 g). The brown sugar is there to help the roots glaze and sweeten, perhaps a teaspoon; the aim is a light gloss, not caramel colour, since colour clouds the finished soup.
- Liquid, in modern termsAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, about 1.1 litres. The vegetables are first stewed in a quart of veal broth or water, then a further one to two quarts of clear soup - consomme or a well-clarified stock - is added at the end. Start with one and judge the strength.
- Skim properlyBecause the roots go in with butter, fat will rise. Skim it off before the consomme goes in, or the soup will never look clear. A folded paper towel drawn across the surface finishes what the spoon misses.
- Summer vegetables go in latePeas, asparagus tips and green beans need only two to four minutes; lettuce and sorrel need less than a minute and sorrel will turn olive-drab almost at once. Add them at the very end rather than boiling them with the roots.
- Leeks and onions in restraintThe original's "a very few" is deliberate. Onion dominates a clear soup quickly; keep it to a fraction of the root mixture.
- YieldWith two to three quarts of finished soup this serves eight to twelve as a first course.
Julienne is a long-established name in the French repertoire: a clear broth with nothing to hide behind but evenly cut roots. The word is generally traced to a personal name, though no particular Julien has ever been convincingly identified, and cookery writers of the period simply used it as a technical term for the cut. Its appearance in an English-language book reflects how thoroughly French kitchen vocabulary had entered the well-staffed household, where a clear soup was expected to open a formal dinner. The instruction to sweat the vegetables in butter with a little sugar before moistening them is the older method, later formalised as glazing, and the closing note on summer additions shows a kitchen still working to the seasons rather than to a fixed list of ingredients.