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Carrot Soup
After scraping six or eight large carrots, cut off the red parts, and place them in a stewpan, slice two onions, cut up one head of celery and a quarter of a pound or so of raw ham, and put them into the stewpan with the carrots, then add one heaping tablespoonful of butter, cover and let simmer over the fire for ten minutes; then add one quart of stock and allow all to simmer until the vegetables are tender. Drain the vegetables well, pound them in a mortar, put them in with the stock in which they were cooked, and add another pint. Strain this through a fine hair sieve, put it into a stewpan, and stir gently over a slow fire until it boils; then remove the stewpan to one side, skim off all the fat, and let it simmer slowly for half an hour. When ready to be served add a gill of cream, a little sugar, pepper and salt.
A classic French carrot purée in Waldorf dress: vegetables sweated in butter, cooked in stock, pounded and sieved, finished with cream. The only genuinely puzzling line is the one about the carrots' red parts.
- "Cut off the red parts"The instruction is to keep the red-orange outer flesh, which goes into the pan, and leave behind the pale inner core, which in the varieties then grown was fibrous and comparatively flavorless. With modern carrots, bred for a less distinct core, the whole root can go in.
- Raw hamMeaning uncooked ham, not the cooked pink deli product; it would still have been salted or cured. A quarter pound of raw ham hock, a piece of unsmoked gammon, or a scrap of prosciutto end all serve; it is there for salt and depth, so hold back on salt until the finish.
- Stock quantityOne quart at the start plus another pint after pounding: six cups total for six to eight large carrots. The recipe does not say whether the final half-hour simmer is covered or open, and gives no reason for it.
- Mortar and hair sieveA blender or food processor replaces the mortar, and a fine-mesh sieve or chinois the hair sieve. Push the purée through with a ladle rather than a spatula; the point of the sieving is to catch carrot and celery fiber that no blender fully breaks down.
- The gill of creamHalf a cup. Add it off the heat or over the barest flame; cream added to a soup and then hard-boiled can separate.
- SkimmingThe instruction to bring it just to a boil, pull the pan to the side and skim is not fussiness. The butter and the ham fat separate out at that moment; taking them off is what makes the finished soup taste clean rather than greasy.
- The sugar"A little" means a pinch, and with today's much sweeter carrots you may want none at all. Taste first.
- YieldRoughly five to six cups once the cream is in, serving six as a first course.
Carrot soup of this kind is the Anglo-American descendant of the French purée à la Crécy, named for Crécy in Picardy, a district long associated with carrots — in classical French kitchen usage the name attached to almost any carrot preparation, and the connection to the town's carrot fields is traditional rather than documented. The method here is straight out of the nineteenth-century professional repertoire: aromatics and a piece of raw ham sweated in butter to build a base, stock, then the labor of pounding and sieving that a hotel brigade could afford and a home cook mostly could not. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, compiled his 1896 book from that hotel repertoire, and the presence of a plain carrot purée among the terrapin and canvasback is a reminder that a fashionable dinner was built on a foundation of well-made, unshowy soups.