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Vegetable Broth
Boil two sliced potatoes, a carrot, turnip and onion for an hour in a quart of water, taking care to keep the full amount of water in, by adding a little now and then, as required; flavor with salt and sweet herbs and strain. Add a little mushroom catsup and serve.
A plain vegetable stock in the older sense: the vegetables are cooked for flavor only and discarded with the strainings. Two points do most of the work — keeping the water level constant, and the mushroom catsup at the end.
- YieldA quart of water, topped up, gives roughly 3 to 4 cups of finished broth, enough for two to four servings as a first course. Vegetable quantities are given only as counts -- "a carrot, turnip and onion" -- so medium ones, around 4 oz each, are a reasonable reading for this volume of water.
- Keep the water upThe instruction to add water "now and then" is the whole method. An hour at a full boil in a wide uncovered pan can carry off a large part of a quart and concentrate the turnip; hold a bare simmer and replenish so the vegetables stay submerged.
- Turnip restraintWhite turnip dominates a broth this lean. Use no more than a small one, or the result tastes of nothing else. Rutabaga ("swede") is not a substitute here — it is sweeter and stronger.
- Sweet herbsPeriod shorthand for the mild culinary herbs — parsley, thyme, marjoram, a bay leaf — as opposed to bitter or medicinal ones. Tie them in a bundle and pull them out before straining; add them in the last 20 minutes rather than at the start, since an hour's boiling flattens them.
- Mushroom catsupNot tomato ketchup. Mushroom catsup is a thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice extract, still sold by British grocers and easily found online. A teaspoon or two is enough. Failing that, a splash of soy sauce or a little mushroom soaking liquid gives the same savory depth, though not the same spicing.
- Season at the endThe recipe salts along with the herbs, before straining; if you prefer, hold the salt until after straining, since the liquid changes volume throughout the hour and salting early leaves you guessing.
- StrainingPour through a fine sieve without pressing on the vegetables. Mashing them through clouds the broth with potato starch, which is exactly what an old-style clear broth was meant to avoid.
Oscar Tschirky's book collects the whole range of Waldorf-Astoria cookery, from terrapin and canvasback down to plainer dishes like this one — thin broths of the sort often said to have been sent up to guests who were unwell or on a restricted diet, a familiar duty of a large hotel kitchen when doctors prescribed "slops" and beef tea by the cup. The reliance on mushroom catsup for savor points to the same tradition: before commercial bouillon cubes were widespread in American kitchens, bottled mushroom and walnut catsups were one common way to give a meatless liquid body and depth, and they turn up in nineteenth-century English and American cookbooks for precisely that purpose. The term "sweet herbs," used here without explanation, was still common currency and had been for generations.