Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Farmer's Soup
Farmer's Soup
Thoroughly clean a bullock's head, break the bones and cut the meat into small pieces. Put them in a large pan with some bacon fat, and fry them until lightly browned. Chop finely two carrots, a root of celery, one turnip, two lettuces, half a cabbage and a few French beans; put them in with the onions and leek, and cook them over a slow fire until the moisture has evaporated. Blanch one pound of raw ham, then put it in with the vegetables, and pour over some broth. When boiling, move the pan to the side of the fire, and let the broth simmer for thirty minutes or so. Then put in one breakfast cupful of minced potatoes, and boil them gently until nearly cooked, and then put in two shredded lettuces, a handful of shredded sorrel, and one pinch of chopped chervil. Finish cooking the soup, then remove the ham. Put some slices of toasted bread into the soup tureen, pour in the soup and serve.
A large, frankly agricultural pot of soup built on gelatinous head meat and a garden's worth of greens. Two things need attention before you start: the cooking time as written is far too short for the cut, and the vegetable list is incomplete.
- The missing ingredientsOnions and leek are called for mid-recipe ("put them in with the onions and leek") but never listed. Reckon on two onions and one large leek, sliced thin, sweated with the other vegetables.
- Bullock's headA whole beef head is a special order from a butcher and an unwieldy thing to break down at home. Beef cheek is the same muscle and the usual modern stand-in; 3-4 lb of cheek, or a mix of cheek and shin with a split marrow bone, gives the same gelatin and flavor.
- Thirty minutes is not enoughHead meat, cheek and shin all need two to three hours of gentle simmering before they yield. Brown the meat, then give it that time in the broth before the vegetables and potato go in, or you will be serving rubber in a good stock.
- Root of celeryMost likely celeriac rather than a stalk of celery, though in period English "root of celery" can also mean a whole head of celery. Reading it as celeriac, one softball-sized root, peeled and diced, is about right.
- Raw ham, blanched"Raw" here means uncooked but salt-cured, and the blanching is to pull out salt rather than to cook it. Drop the piece into boiling water for five minutes, drain, then add it. It is a seasoning device, which is why it comes out again at the end; slice it and serve it separately rather than discarding it.
- Heat levelsA "slow fire" for the vegetables means low heat, sweating them until the released moisture cooks off, twenty minutes or so; keep the pan uncovered, or finish uncovered, since the recipe wants the moisture gone. Moving the pan "to the side of the fire" means dropping to a bare simmer.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, roughly 8-10 fl oz, so about half a pound of diced potato. "Minced" here means finely diced, not ground.
- Sorrel and chervilBoth are market-stall or garden herbs. Sorrel's job is acidity and it collapses to a purée in minutes, so it goes in at the end as directed; a squeeze of lemon covers its absence badly but adequately. Chervil is delicate and should not be substituted with parsley if you can help it, as parsley pushes the soup somewhere else.
- Yield and serviceNo quantity is given for the head or the broth, so any yield figure is an estimate: scaled down to a few pounds of meat this fills a large tureen and serves eight to ten, while the whole head as written would feed considerably more. The toast in the bottom of the tureen softens into the broth and thickens it; use a sturdy country loaf, not sandwich bread, or it disintegrates.
Farmer's soup, or soupe de paysan, belongs to a family of European household soups whose logic is that the cheapest cut of beef and whatever is in the kitchen garden will, given long enough on the stove, make a meal for a large table. The head was among the least expensive parts of the animal in the nineteenth century and gave a good deal of gelatin, which is why it turns up in so many soups of this type. Its presence in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is worth noting: the Waldorf's dining rooms were not serving bullock's head to guests, though a hotel kitchen that broke down whole animals would have had heads to use. Much of the book is like this, setting grand-hotel garnishes beside frugal kitchen cookery in the same voice. The finishing gesture, greens and sorrel and chervil thrown in at the last minute over slices of toast in the tureen, is the older French practice from which the word soupe itself comes: the sop of bread that the broth was poured over.