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Vegetable Soup
Chop finely sufficient onion, carrot and celery in equal proportions to fill five breakfast cups, also one teacupful each of turnip, cabbage and parsnip. The cabbage, parsnip and onion should have been partially boiled for five minutes and then well drained. Put all the vegetables into a saucepan, pour in one quart of stock and one quart of boiling water and boil gently until tender; then put in with them one breakfast cupful of tomatoes, one tablespoonful of chopped parsley, one teaspoonful each of salt and sugar and one-half teaspoonful of pepper. Turn the soup into a tureen and serve.
A large-format hotel soup written for cooks who measured by the cups on the table rather than by a graduated measure. The proportions are sound; the vessels need translating.
- Breakfast cup and teacupA breakfast cup is roughly 8 to 10 fl oz, so read it as a generous cup; a teacup is about 6 fl oz. Five breakfast cups of mixed onion, carrot and celery means something close to five cups total, divided in thirds, not five cups of each.
- Blanch first, and drain hardThe five-minute parboil of cabbage, parsnip and onion is the hinge. It pulls the sulfurous edge off the cabbage and onion and the sweet muddiness off the parsnip, and discarding that water is what keeps the finished soup clear-tasting rather than cabbagey.
- StockThe original says only "stock," which in a hotel kitchen would have meant whatever was standing in the stock pot. Unsalted chicken or beef stock works; if you use a salted commercial stock, hold back the teaspoon of salt until the end.
- Cut sizeThe recipe says only "chop finely"; a small, even dice of about a quarter inch suits it. Uniformity matters more than fineness, since carrot and turnip cook slower than celery and cabbage.
- TimingTwo quarts of liquid against roughly eight cups of diced vegetables will be tender in 25 to 35 minutes at a bare simmer. Boiling hard shreds the cabbage and clouds the broth.
- TomatoesThe recipe does not say fresh or canned; canned tomatoes were widely available by this period and would already be broken down. A cup of canned diced or crushed tomatoes with their juice is a close match. Note that the recipe adds them only after the other vegetables are tender.
- SugarThe teaspoon of sugar is there to balance the tomato acid, not to sweeten. Taste before adding it if your tomatoes are ripe or the parsnip is very sweet.
- YieldAbout four quarts, serving ten to twelve as a first course. It thickens and improves overnight; loosen with a little stock on reheating.
Oscar Tschirky was never formally the chef of the Waldorf, but as maître d'hôtel he put his name to the 1896 Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf, a nine-hundred-page compendium that reads less like a household manual than like the working repertoire of a large American hotel kitchen. The method — equal parts onion, carrot and celery as a base, with cabbage, parsnip and turnip blanched separately before they join the pot — echoes French kitchen practice of the period, the same logic behind a potage paysanne or a julienne, translated into breakfast cups for an American readership.