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Onion Soup (Taking care not to discolour)
taking care not to discolour them. Have ready three or four handsful of sorrel well washed and cut into ribbons, and add them to the onions with a table-spoonful of flour, then mix well, adding one pint of milk and one quart of water; boil altogether for two minutes, keeping it well stirred; then take it off the fire, and stir in quickly the yolks of two eggs, mixed with half a pint of cream. Do not boil it after the eggs are in.
Another.-Flour and fry a quart of green peas, four onions sliced. the coarse stalks of celery, a carrot, a turnip, and a parsnip, then pour on them three quarts of water. Let it simmer till the whole will pulp through a sieve, then boil in it the best of the celery cut thin.
Two onion soups: the first a sorrel-and-onion purée finished with an egg-and-cream liaison, the second a vegetable soup thickened by pulping everything through a sieve. Both are straightforward once the archaic proportions are read correctly.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the yolks and cream go in, the soup must not boil or even approach a simmer, or the eggs curdle into threads. Take the pan off the heat, temper a ladle of hot soup into the yolk-cream mixture first, then stir it back in and serve at once.
- SorrelThree or four handfuls is a loose measure; expect a few ounces of leaves, stems stripped. Sorrel collapses to almost nothing and turns olive-drab within a minute of heat, which is normal; its job here is sharp acidity, not colour. Cook it in stainless or enamel, never bare cast iron or aluminium, which the oxalic acid will react with.
- "Not to discolour them"The onions are to be softened pale and soft over low heat, not browned; the fat is not named in the surviving text. Browning would give a wholly different, darker soup and would muddy the pale green the sorrel gives.
- Liquid quantitiesA pint plus a quart of liquid is 20 fl oz and 40 fl oz in imperial measure, about 2.5 and 5 US cups; half a pint of cream is 10 fl oz, about 1.25 US cups. That is a rich finish by modern standards and can be cut to half a cup of cream without harming the dish.
- Two minutes' boilingThat is enough only to cook out the raw flour if the onions are already soft. Give the flour a minute in the butter with the onions before adding liquid, or the soup will taste pasty.
- The second soup"Flour and fry" means to dust the vegetables with flour and fry them in butter or dripping before the water goes on, which both thickens the soup and browns it. Three quarts of water to that quantity of vegetables is generous; expect a long simmer, an hour or more, before anything will pulp.
- SievingA food mill, or a blender followed by a sieve, does in minutes what a wooden spoon and a hair sieve did at length. The celery strings are the reason the sieve is still worth using after blending.
- YieldThe first soup makes about six servings, the second eight or so as a first course. Both want salt assertively; neither recipe mentions it.