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Soup from Stock
To make soup from any stock, put on as much stock as needed (if in jelly, scrape the sediment from off the bottom), add seasoning, water and vegetables. The potatoes should be peeled, sliced, and laid in salt and water for half an hour, the cabbage parboiled and drained, and all others either sliced or cut fine, before adding them to the soup; boil until thoroughly dissolved, strain through a colander and serve at once.
This is a method rather than a formula: a way of turning yesterday's stockpot into today's soup. The instructions assume a cook who has cold jellied stock on hand and vegetables that need taming before they go in.
- Jellied stock and the sedimentGood stock chilled overnight sets to a jelly with a layer of cloudy sediment and settled fat at the bottom. Scraping it off is worth doing — it is what keeps the finished soup clear rather than muddy — and any solid fat on top lifts away in a sheet at the same time.
- "Boil until thoroughly dissolved"The vegetables are meant to break down completely, because the soup is strained and only the liquid served. That implies a much longer boil than the brief cooking given to vegetables you intend to eat whole; no time is specified, so cook until the pieces have genuinely fallen apart.
- Potatoes in salt and waterThe half-hour soak is the usual period treatment for cut potatoes; it is variously explained as drawing out surface starch that would cloud the broth and as keeping the slices from discolouring. Sliced thin, they will largely disintegrate, which suits a soup that is strained.
- Parboiled cabbageCabbage boiled from raw in the soup releases sulfur compounds that can dominate everything else. Parboiling briefly in a separate pot and pouring that water off, as directed here, removes much of it.
- StrainingA colander, not a fine sieve — the aim is to catch the spent vegetable pulp while letting the thickened liquid through. Press the solids lightly with the back of a ladle to recover the last of the broth.
- ProportionsNone are given; the amount of stock is simply "as much as needed." As a modern working guide, a quart of stock, a pint of water and about a pound of mixed vegetables will give roughly four servings.
- SeasoningSeason at the end as well as the beginning. A long boil concentrates the salt already in the stock, so a cautious hand early and a correction before straining is safer than salting to taste at the start.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks treat stock as a standing household resource rather than an ingredient bought for a particular dish: bones and trimmings went into the pot, the result was strained into a crock, and it set in the cool larder as a jelly to be drawn on through the week. That practice is why so many books of the period, including this one, carry a separate entry for soup made from stock. The straining here is done through a colander, with the vegetables boiled to a pulp, so what results is a thick soup rather than a clear one.