Carrot Soup
Put in soup-kettle a knuckle of veal, three or four quarts cold water, a quart finely-sliced carrots, one head celery; boil two and a half hours, add a handful rice, and boil an hour longer; season with pepper (or a bit of red pepper pod) and salt, and serve.
A plain nineteenth-century household soup: veal shank simmered into stock with carrots, celery and rice, all in one pot. It works, but the timings assume a coal range and a cook who is not watching the clock.
- Knuckle of vealThis is the shank or hock, sold today as veal osso buco or a whole cross-cut shank, about 2-3 lb with the bone in. The joint's collagen is the point; it gives the broth body without any added thickener. A veal shank is not always in the case, so order ahead or substitute beef shank, accepting a darker, heavier stock.
- The potA "soup-kettle" is simply a large stockpot. Three to four quarts of water over a shank fills an 8-quart pot comfortably and leaves room for the reduction the long boil will produce.
- Boil means simmerAn actual rolling boil for two and a half hours will emulsify the fat and cloud the broth. Bring it up, skim the grey foam that rises in the first fifteen minutes, then hold it at a bare tremble.
- Carrots go in twiceA quart of sliced carrot is roughly a pound. Cooked the full three and a half hours it collapses into thread and loses its sweetness to the broth. Add half at the start for flavour and the rest with the rice so the finished soup has carrot you can see.
- The riceA "handful" is about 1/2 cup of long-grain white rice. An hour is far longer than rice needs; twenty minutes at a simmer is enough, and the extra time only turns it to paste that thickens the soup into porridge. If you want the original's thickened texture, use the full hour deliberately rather than by accident.
- The meatThe recipe never says what becomes of the shank. Lift it out before serving, pull the meat from the bone, discard gristle and fat, and return the meat to the pot. Discarding it wastes the better part of the dish.
- Head of celeryA head here is the whole bunch, not a single rib. Use the bunch with its leaves, which carry most of the aroma.
- Red pepper podA single dried cayenne or similar small hot pod, added whole and fished out before serving. It is a warming background note rather than heat you taste directly.
- YieldAbout three quarts after reduction, serving six to eight as a first course or four as a supper with bread.
Carrot soup thickened with rice belongs to a long line of economical "knuckle" soups that ran through English and American cookbooks from the eighteenth century onward, built on the cheapest joint in the butcher's case. Veal shank was a household staple precisely because it was mostly bone and connective tissue and could be bought for very little, while yielding a gelatinous broth that reads as rich. The Dixie Cook Book, compiled in the 1880s from contributed household receipts, carries a soup section that includes such long-simmered one-pot stocks, and the assumption behind them is a range that stayed hot all day whether or not anyone needed it. Carrots, cheap, storable through winter in a root cellar and sweet enough to season a bland broth without sugar, were the natural vegetable to build such a soup around, and their pairing with rice as a thickener is often said to have been common before flour-based cream soups became more widespread on American tables.