Vegetable Soup
1 quart brown stock, cleared
1 cup diced vegetables, raw or or not cleared cooked
Salt
Pepper
If a clear soup is desired, follow the directions for clarifying soup stock and then add the vegetables. If the vegetables are already cooked, the soup needs to be boiled for only a few minutes. When raw vegetables are added, simmer until the vegetables are all tender, adding boiling water, if necessary, to replace any that may have evaporated. Season and serve.
A skeleton formula rather than a fixed recipe: a quart of brown stock, a cup of vegetables, and a decision about whether you want the broth clear. A few notes on what the original assumes you already know.
- The garbled lineThe ingredient list has suffered in transcription. It reads: 1 quart brown stock, cleared or not cleared; 1 cup diced vegetables, raw or cooked; salt; pepper. That is the whole thing.
- Brown stockBeef or veal bones roasted before simmering, which is what gives the deep colour. A good unsalted beef broth stands in, but reduce it slightly and taste before seasoning, since commercial broth is already salted.
- ClarifyingThe book sends you to a separate entry. The standard method of the period is a raft of lightly beaten egg white with crushed shell, whisked into cold or barely warm stock, brought slowly to a bare simmer without stirring, then ladled off through a cloth. Clarifying after the vegetables go in defeats the purpose, which is why the instruction is to clear first.
- Cut size is the timingWith no cooking time given, the dice does the work. A quarter-inch dice of carrot, turnip, celery and onion should be tender in roughly a quarter of an hour at a simmer; larger pieces will take considerably longer, and knocking about in the pot they can cloud a broth you have gone to the trouble of clearing.
- Add in order of hardnessRaw root vegetables first, then celery, then anything green in the last few minutes. Cooked leftovers, as the recipe allows, need only to heat through -- a few minutes, no more, or they collapse.
- Keep it at a simmerA hard boil turns a clarified consommé cloudy again and shreds the vegetables. Bare bubbles only, and top up with boiling rather than cold water so the temperature does not drop.
- YieldA quart with a cup of vegetables serves four as a first course, two as a light supper. Season at the end, after any reduction has concentrated the stock.
This is less a recipe than an entry in a system. Cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s, especially those aimed at the new domestic-science-trained housekeeper, taught soups as a set of proportions applied to a stockpot that was assumed to be running most of the week: brown stock from roasted bones, white stock from veal or poultry, and then a page of variations distinguished mainly by what was dropped into them. Publishers of the period issued household books in the same spirit of standardisation -- a base, a formula, a predictable result. The choice offered here between clear and unclear broth is often said to reflect a broader division in household practice: a clarified consommé was dinner-party food, while the same stock left cloudy with whatever vegetables were on hand was the family's midday soup and a way of using up yesterday's cooked carrots and turnips.