Home › Refuse Vegetables › Refuse Vegetables
Refuse Vegetables
1173. Take turnips, carrots, leeks, potatoes, the outer leaves of lettuce, celery, or any sort of vegetable that is at hand; cut them small, and throw in to any quantity of boilings, with the thick part of peas, after they have been pulped for soup; or grits, or coarse oatmeal, which have been used for gruel; or bread-crumb and refuse pieces of bread.
This is a method rather than a formula: a frame for turning trimmings and the leavings of other dishes into a thick pottage. Everything here depends on what the liquid is and how long the pot goes on.
- "Boilings"The word most likely means the liquor left from boiling meat, bacon or vegetables — pot liquor rather than plain water. If it is meat or bacon liquor it carries all the salt and savour the dish will have, so taste it before adding anything; bacon or salt-beef liquor can be strong enough to need diluting.
- "The thick part of peas"Dried peas were boiled soft and pushed through a sieve for pea soup; the coarse hulls and pulp left in the sieve are what is meant. Split peas cooked to a purée, or the thicker dregs at the bottom of a pot of pea soup, do the same job as a thickener.
- Grits and coarse oatmealHere these are the leftovers of breakfast gruel, already swollen and cooked. If starting from dry oatmeal instead, use pinhead or steel-cut and allow 30-40 minutes of simmering; modern rolled oats will dissolve into slime in a fraction of that time.
- Cut small, and stagger the potEverything is meant to break down, but roots and greens do not do so at the same rate. Turnip, carrot and potato want 20-25 minutes; leek, celery and the outer leaves of lettuce want the last 5-10, or they turn grey and bitter.
- Bread as thickenerStale crumb whisked into hot broth thickens it within a few minutes and gives body without flour. Cut away any hard crust first, or it will stay in the bowl as leathery lumps.
- Seasoning is left to youThe original gives no seasoning at all. Pepper, a bay leaf, thyme, or a little mustard at the end all pull this together; without something it eats flat.
- Judge the trimmingsOuter leaves and stalks are perfectly good, but discard anything slimy, mouldy or bitter, and peel away green patches on potatoes. Cooking does not redeem spoiled vegetables.
- YieldNo quantities are given anywhere. Reckon roughly 1 lb of prepared vegetable scraps and a handful of cooked oatmeal or pea pulp to each 2 pints of liquor, which gives about four bowls of a thick, spoonable soup.
Recipes like this one belong to the nineteenth-century literature of economical and charitable cookery rather than to the dinner-table proper: cheap, filling pottages built on pot liquor and pulses, of the kind ladled out at parish soup kitchens and by the household to its dependents. The approach is generally traced to Count Rumford's late-eighteenth-century experiments in feeding the poor of Munich on barley, peas and water, which shaped British thinking on soup for the destitute for decades afterwards. What is striking is the assumption behind it — that a kitchen produced pea hulls, half-eaten gruel, stale loaves and bushels of outer leaves as a matter of routine, and that a cook was expected to know what to do with all of them. The word "refuse" in the title carries no sense of spoilage; it simply means what is left over after the better part has been taken.