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Soup Without Meat
Cut four large onions into slices, put them in a saucepan with one-half pound of butter and toss over the fire for a few minutes. Put in with the onions some celery cut into small pieces, a bunch of chopped parsley and some finely-shredded cabbage lettuces; stir these ingredients over the fire for fifteen minutes, then put in one breakfast cupful of crushed dry biscuits and two quarts of boiling milk and water mixed in equal quantities. Season the soup to taste with salt and pepper and let it simmer by the side of the fire for an hour. Beat two eggs well and stir them in the soup when taken from the fire. Serve with a plateful of sippets of toast.
A Victorian meatless soup that leans on onion, lettuce and milk for body rather than stock. Two things decide whether it works: keeping the milk below a boil, and tempering the eggs at the end.
- The eggsBeat the eggs, then whisk a ladleful of hot soup into them before stirring the mixture back into the pot off the heat. Added straight to the pan they will scramble into threads.
- Milk and heatMilk-based soup scorches on the bottom and skins on top. "Simmer by the side of the fire" means the gentlest possible heat, barely trembling, on a low burner with occasional stirring.
- Half a pound of butterThat is two full sticks for four onions, generous even by 1896 standards. Four to six tablespoons sweats the vegetables perfectly well; the original quantity will leave a slick on the surface.
- Dry biscuitsPlain unsweetened water biscuits or cream crackers, crushed to crumbs, used as a thickener. Not American baking-powder biscuits. Unsalted saltines or matzo work; adjust salt at the end since crackers bring their own.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup was never a standard measure; it is usually reckoned at roughly half a pint, so somewhere around 1 to 1 1/2 cups of crumbs. Start at the lower end and judge the body after the hour of simmering.
- Cabbage lettucesA heading lettuce rather than cabbage; butterhead or Boston types suit well. Shred it fine; it wilts quickly in the butter.
- SippetsSmall strips or triangles of dry toast, served alongside rather than floated in the bowl.
- YieldTwo quarts of liquid plus the vegetables gives six to eight servings as a first course.
The title is the point: in a kitchen where most soups began with beef or veal stock, one made without meat needed announcing, and soups of this kind were useful for Friday and Lenten tables and for stretching household budgets. The technique reads as old-fashioned English rather than French -- vegetables sweated in butter, thickened with crushed biscuit, finished with beaten egg and served with sippets of toast. The vocabulary points the same way: "breakfast cupful," "cabbage lettuces" and "sippets" are British cookery terms, and Oscar Tschirky's 1896 compilation is generally thought to draw heavily on earlier printed cookbooks as well as the Waldorf's own recipes. Cooked rather than dressed lettuce was also unremarkable at a time when salad greens were seasonal.