Home › Recipes › Recipes: Clear
Recipes: Clear
SOUPS No. 19. Clear Soup Ingredients: Stock meat, water, a bunch of herbs (thyme, parsley, chervil, bay leaf, basil, marjoram), three carrots, three turnips, three onions, three cloves stuck in the onions, one blade of mace.
Cut up three pounds of stock meat small and put it in a stock pot with two quarts of cold water, three carrots, and three turnips cut up, three onions with a clove stuck in each one, a bunch of herbs and a blade of mace. Let it come to the boil and then draw it off, at once skim off all the scum, and keep it gently simmering, and occasionally add two or three tablespoonsful of cold water. Let it simmer all day, and then strain it through a fine cloth.
Some of the liquor in which a calf's head has been cooked, or even a calf's foot, will greatly improve a clear soup.
The stock should never be allowed to boil as long as the meat and vegetables are in the stock pot.
No. 20. Zuppa Primaverile (Spring Soup) Ingredients: Clear soup, vegetables.
Any fresh spring vegetables will do for this soup, but they must all be cooked separately and put into the soup at the last minute. It is best made with fresh peas, asparagus tips, and a few strips of tarragon.
No. 21. Soup alla Lombarda Ingredients: Clear soup, fowl forcemeat, Béchamel (No. 3), peas, lobster butter, eggs, asparagus.
Make a firm forcemeat of fowl and divide it into three parts, to the first add two spoonsful of cream Béchamel, to the second four spoonsful of purée of green peas, to the third two spoonsful of lobster butter and the yolk of an egg; thus you will have the Italian colours-red, white, and green.
Butter a pie dish and make little quenelles of the forcemeat. Just before serving boil them for four minutes in boiling stock, take them out carefully and put them in a warm soup tureen with two spoonsful of cooked green peas and pour a very fresh clear soup over them. Hand little croûtons fried in lobster butter separately.
No. 22. Tuscan Soup Ingredients: Stock, eggs.
Whip up three or four eggs, gradually add good stock to them, and keep on whisking them up until they begin to curdle. Keep the soup hot in a bain-marie.
Four linked recipes built on one foundation: a long, never-boiling meat stock. Everything else here depends on getting that first pot right.
- The hinge: never let it boilClarity in this soup comes entirely from temperature control, not from an egg-white raft. A rolling boil emulsifies fat and drives fine protein through the liquid, and no straining will bring the sparkle back. Hold it at a bare shiver, 180-190F, where a bubble breaks the surface every few seconds.
- "Draw it off"Most likely means pull the pot off the direct heat the moment it reaches boiling point so the scum sets and can be lifted, then return it to the gentlest heat; it can also be read as drawing off the scum itself. The tablespoons of cold water added later work the same way: they check the temperature and push more scum to the top.
- Stock meatIn 1901 this meant cheap gelatinous cuts with bone: shin, neck, leg of beef, a knuckle of veal. Three pounds of meat to two quarts of water is a rich ratio; the finished quantity is hard to predict, since the recipe has you topping up with cold water through the day, but reckon on a first course rather than a main-dish quantity.
- Calf's head and calf's footThese were the period's gelatine source, giving the soup body and a glossy mouthfeel. A veal knuckle, split, or a pig's trotter does the same thing and is easier to buy.
- Simmer all dayBeef stock gives up almost everything it has in five to six hours; beyond that you are only reducing. If you do run it eight or ten hours, do not leave it to cool slowly overnight in the pot. Strain and chill it fast in a shallow container, which is also the easiest way to lift the fat cap off next morning.
- A blade of maceOne piece of the lacy aril from a nutmeg, not ground mace. If you only have ground, use a pinch and strain carefully; it clouds.
- Lobster butterShells pounded with butter, warmed to draw out the colour, then strained. It is the red in the tricolore quenelles and in the croutons, and there is no supermarket substitute; make it from the shells of a cooked lobster or leave that third of the forcemeat plain and accept two colours.
- QuenellesShape them with two wet teaspoons. Four minutes in barely-simmering stock is right for teaspoon-sized ones; poach a test one first, since forcemeat that is too loose will disintegrate. Poach them in a side pan of stock, not in the clear soup you are serving, or you will cloud it.
- Tuscan SoupClose kin to stracciatella, though here the stock goes into the eggs rather than the eggs into the broth. The eggs must be beaten first and the hot stock added to them gradually, or you get scrambled egg rather than fine threads. The bain-marie is there because the soup will separate if it is put back over a direct flame.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) was written by Mrs W. G. Waters and framed, in the manner of Boccaccio, as ten days of cookery discussed by a party of friends detained in the country; its purpose was to argue Italian cooking to an English readership that mostly knew French. That accounts for the shape of this run of recipes: a thoroughly Anglo-French consomme, unclarified and simmered all day in the Victorian manner, followed by three Italian ways of dressing it. The Soup alla Lombarda is the most self-conscious of them, its three forcemeats coloured white, green and red to make the flag of a kingdom then only forty years old, a piece of patriotic table decoration of a kind said to recur in Italian cookbooks of the period. The Tuscan soup is the plainest and the oldest idea in the group, egg beaten into hot broth, a technique found across the Mediterranean and often said, by tradition rather than documented descent, to go back to Roman cookery.