Swiss Soup
Five gallons water, six potatoes and three turnips sliced; boil five hours until perfectly dissolved and the consistency of pea soup, fill, ing up as it boils away; add butter size of an egg, season with salt and pepper, and serve. A small piece salt pork, a bone or bit of veal or lamb, and an onion, may be added to vary this soup.
This is charity-kitchen cookery scaled for a cauldron: five gallons of water thickened by nothing but nine root vegetables cooked to collapse. It works, but the proportions and the timing both need reading carefully before you commit a stockpot.
- The scale is institutionalFive gallons is roughly 80 cups, enough for 40 or more servings. Divided by eight, a household batch is about 2.5 quarts water, a large potato and a third of a turnip, with roughly half a tablespoon of butter.
- Butter size of an eggA standard nineteenth-century measure: about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. At full scale that is the only fat in five gallons, which tells you how thin this soup was meant to be.
- Five hours is the point, not an errorThere is no roux, no cream and no purée step. The long boil is what breaks the potato starch down so the soup body comes from dissolved vegetable alone. A modern cook can shorten this considerably by simmering an hour and then using an immersion blender, though the texture will be smoother and less silky than the long-boiled version.
- Turnips need watchingTurnips turn sulfurous and bitter under prolonged hard boiling. Keep the pot at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil, and taste at the two-hour mark before deciding how much longer to go.
- Season only at the endThe instruction to top up as it boils away means the volume is never stable. Salt added early will concentrate unpredictably. Salt pork, if used, contributes plenty on its own.
- The variations are the recipe's real intentThe variations change the dish -- Salt pork, a veal or lamb bone and an onion turn this from thickened water into something with actual savour. The recipe offers them only as options, but a cook wanting flavour should take them up, browning the bone first and giving it the full simmer.
- Yield and servingAs written, some 80 cups, or 40-plus servings. Serve very hot with bread; it has almost no fat to carry it and cools fast in the bowl.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the great wave of late nineteenth-century American compilations that gathered recipes of every register between the same covers, from company dinners to soups like this one, which is plainly designed to feed many people from almost nothing. Thin potato-and-root soups stretched with water and finished with a scrap of salt pork were a standing feature of poorhouse, army and relief cookery throughout the century, and the type is often traced back to the economical soups promoted by Count Rumford in the 1790s for feeding the poor of Munich. Why it is called Swiss is unclear; the name seems to have attached to more than one unrelated nineteenth-century soup, and probably signals rustic thrift rather than any actual Swiss dish. What the recipe does document precisely is the older understanding of soup as a way to make five gallons of water nourishing, rather than as a course in a menu.