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Vegetable Soup
veal, to which add three pounds of artichokes, to be pulped through a sieve; season with salt and a small quantity of cayenne pepper, and before it is poured into the tureen stir in some good thick cream; it must on no account be permitted to boil after the cream has been added, but care must be taken that it is not chilled by it. 270. TO MAKE SOUP FOR SUPPER. -Take a quart of good new milk, and add a pint of cream, a bit of lemon-peel, a laurel-leaf or two, a stick of cinnamon, a few coriander-seeds, and a small piece of sugar; boil a few minutes, and set it to cool; then beat the yolks of ten eggs, and blanch and pound two ounces of sweet almonds, and two or three bitter almonds, with a little water in a mortar till very fine; then put them with the cream; mix the eggs smoothly with it in the stewpan, having previously run the mixture through a coarse sieve; stir it over a gentle fire till it begins to thicken like a custard; then pour it into the tureen with some slices of French roll as thick as biscuits, 271. JENNY LIND'S Sour.-Make three quarts of stock, which strain through a fine sieve into a stewpan; add to it three ounces of sago, and let it boil gently for twenty minutes, then skim it. The stock, being previously seasoned, will only require half a tea-spoonful of sugar, a little salt, pepper, and nutmeg; a little thyme, parsley, and a bay leaf will vary the flavour. Just before serving, put into a basin the well-beaten yolks of four eggs, and add to them half a pint of cream; then take the stewpan off the fire, pour it in, stir quickly for one minute, and serve immediately. If it boil again it will be spoiled. 272. Put a lump of butter into a stewpan, let it boil; have ready a small quantity of cabbage, red and white, beet, sorrel, onions, carrots, potatoes, peas, French beans, cauliflowers, parsley leaves and root, lettuces, cucumbers, artichoke bottoms, Jerusalem artichokes, and asparagus chopped very fine; let them stew in the butter till quite tender, stirring to prevent their burning. Season with cayenne, salt, pepper, and ketchup, and celery seed, add some good meat broth, and boil it all together, and serve hot. Any of the vegetables may be omitted, but the greater variety the better, and care must be taken that the flavour of any one vegetable does not predominate over the rest. Another. Put into two quarts of cold water two pounds of Jerusalem artichokes pared and halved, one pound of turnips pared and sliced, two or three onions, and a stick of celery. Boil all together slowly for two and a half hours, with a stock made of veal or rabbits; then add two table-spoonsful of flour, one ounce of butter, and pepper and salt to the taste. Let it simmer half an hour longer, skimming it carefully, then serve. 273. A TRANSPARENT WHITE SOUP. -Take a large knuckle or small leg of veal, and cut off all the meat as thin as possible, and break the bone in pieces. Put the meat in a large jug or stock-pot, the bones at the top, with a bunch of sweet herbs, a quarter of an ounce of mace, and a quarter of a pound of Jordan almonds beaten fine. Pour on it four quarts of boiling water; let it stand by the fire all night covered close; the next day put it in a well-tinned or enamelled saucepan; let it boil gently till reduced one half; remove the scum and fat as it rises while it is boiling; strain it into an earthen pan to settle, and in two or three hours' time pour it again with a spoonful of sugar into a clean saucepan, clear from all sediment. Add, before serving, vermicelli or carrot, or French beans cut in long thin narrow strips, or asparagus in short lengths, previously boiled, and serve the whole very hot; a little white wine may be added if approved.
This page carries several soups in sequence: a fine-chopped mixed vegetable soup thickened with butter and broth, a plainer Jerusalem artichoke and turnip version, an almond-and-egg supper soup, Jenny Lind's sago soup, and a clear veal-and-almond white soup. The caution above applies specifically to the supper soup, no. 270, which is built on bitter almonds.
- Why no. 270 must not be madeBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernels are crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding them in a mortar with water does. The recipe uses only two or three bitter almonds against two ounces of sweet ones, a flavouring quantity rather than a large one, but bitter almonds are no longer sold at retail in the United States and their sale is restricted in some other countries. Use a current recipe if you want an almond custard soup.
- The hinge in the egg-and-cream soupsNo. 271 finishes with beaten yolks and cream stirred in with the stewpan off the fire, and the original is blunt about it: if it boils again it is spoiled. No. 270 cooks its yolks over a gentle fire until it thickens like a custard, which needs the same care. Keep the liquid below about 180F and stir constantly, and temper the yolks with a ladle of the hot liquid before they go in.
- Butter-stewed vegetables (272)"Let it boil" of the butter probably means heating it until it foams rather than browning it. The recipe says only to stew the vegetables in the butter till quite tender; chopped very fine, that is likely to take something like 15-20 minutes of gentle sweating, with the harder roots given a head start on the peas, beans, sorrel and lettuce.
- KetchupIn a book of this date ketchup means mushroom or walnut ketchup — a thin, dark, salty, anchovy-adjacent seasoning, not tomato sauce. A teaspoon of mushroom ketchup or Worcestershire sauce gives the intended savoury lift; tomato ketchup will not.
- SagoThree ounces of pearl sago in three quarts of stock is a light thickening; the grains should go clear and slightly gelatinous in the twenty minutes given. Tapioca pearls behave much the same if sago is hard to find.
- Jerusalem artichokesThese are sunchokes, not globe artichokes; the artichokes pulped through a sieve in the fragment at the top of the page are probably globe artichokes, though the text does not say so. Sunchokes discolour fast once pared, so hold the halves in acidulated water. They are high in inulin and can be windy in the quantity given.
- Two and a half hours is longer than neededThe artichoke and turnip soup should be fully tender well short of two and a half hours — 45-60 minutes is usually enough — and a long slow boil of that kind suits a range where the pot could sit untended. Add the flour-and-butter thickening as a cooked roux or a beurre manie to avoid lumps.
- The transparent white soupStanding the jug by the fire overnight is an unrefrigerated warm hold and is not worth reproducing; make it as an ordinary veal stock, simmered gently and reduced by half, then clarified by settling and careful decanting. A quarter pound of pounded Jordan almonds is a sweet-almond enrichment and is safe.
- YieldNo. 271 makes three quarts, roughly twelve to fourteen servings as a first course; no. 273 starts with four quarts of water and is boiled down by half. The mixed vegetable soup at no. 272 scales freely; the instruction that matters is that no single vegetable should dominate.
Soup thickened with egg yolks and cream at the last moment is the old French liaison, and its appearance across these entries shows how thoroughly mid-Victorian British cookery had absorbed French kitchen practice while keeping British larder items like mushroom ketchup and celery seed. The sago soup carries the name of Jenny Lind, the Swedish soprano whose tours of Britain and America around 1847-1852 made her one of the most famous women alive; dishes, streets and ships were named for her, and a light, restorative, sago-thickened soup was the sort of thing a singer was popularly said to favour for the voice — an attribution generally treated as commercial flattery rather than documented fact. The long list at no. 272 is a reminder that a well-stocked kitchen garden, not a shop, set the limits of a vegetable soup: red and white cabbage, sorrel, artichoke bottoms and asparagus were things a household grew, and the cook used whatever the beds were yielding that week.