Rice Soup
267. Boil about two teacupsful of rice in a quart of water with two onions and two sticks of celery, till the rice is quite soft. Put one or two ounces of butter and about two table-spoonsful of flour into a stewpan, and when melted add the above with some stock (which is best made of some veal bones or boilings), and stir till of a proper thickness. Flavour with a little salt and pepper, and just before serving add a tea-spoonful of cream.
A simple white soup built on a flour-and-butter liaison rather than cream, typical of mid-Victorian invalid and family cookery. The main thing to watch is the ratio: the rice is generous and the liquid is not, so the pan needs attention.
- TeacupfulA Victorian teacup is usually reckoned at somewhere between a gill (5 fl oz) and about 6 fl oz, so two teacupsful is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups (around 10 oz) of raw rice. Against a single quart of water that is very little liquid; the grains will absorb nearly all of it and the pan will need stirring toward the end to stop it catching.
- StewpanA stewpan is a wide, straight-sided saucepan with a lid. Any heavy 3-4 quart saucepan does the job; the width matters mainly for making the roux evenly.
- The roux is the hingeCook the butter and flour together for two or three minutes before adding anything, and add the rice mixture and stock a little at a time, stirring. Tipping in a quart of hot rice porridge all at once gives lumps that no amount of later stirring will remove.
- Stock"Veal bones or boilings" means either raw veal bones simmered for stock or the cooking liquor from boiled meat. A light chicken or veal stock is the modern equivalent; avoid dark beef stock, which will colour a soup meant to be pale. Reckon on 1-1 1/2 quarts to bring it to soup consistency.
- TextureAs written this stays a broken-rice soup. If a smooth white soup is wanted, pass it through a sieve or give it a short blitz with a stick blender before the seasoning goes in, then thin with more stock.
- The onions and celeryThey are cooked with the rice for flavour and the recipe never says to take them out, so they may either have been strained off or left to break down into the soup. Chop them rather than leaving them whole unless you intend to fish them out.
- The creamA single teaspoon is a token enrichment for the whole pot. Two or three tablespoons of double cream, stirred in off the heat, is closer to what a modern palate expects, and the soup should not boil after it goes in.
- YieldAbout four to six servings, depending on how much stock is used to let it down.
Rice soups of this kind sit between the kitchen and the sickroom in nineteenth-century British cookery. Rice was cheap, kept well, and was thought easy on the digestion, so plain rice soups appear repeatedly in Victorian household books under both "soups" and "cookery for invalids". The reliance on veal bones or the liquor from boiled meat is the giveaway of a working household economy: nothing is bought specially, and the soup is assembled from what the day's cooking has already produced. The butter-and-flour thickening, with cream added only at the last moment and in a very small quantity, marks it as an everyday dish rather than a company one -- richer white soups of the period would have gone in for eggs, almonds or a great deal more cream.