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Vegetable Soup (Three onions three carrots)
Three onions, three carrots, three turnips, one small cabbage, one pint tomatoes; chop all the vegetables except the tomatoes very fine, have ready in a porcelain kettle three quarts boiling water, put in all except cabbage and tomatoes and simmer for half an hour, then add the chopped cabbage and tomatoes (the tomatoes previously stewed), also a bunch of sweet herbs. Let soup boil for twenty minutes, strain through sieve, rubbing all the vegetables through. Take two table-spoons of best butter and one of flour and beat to a cream. Now pepper and salt soup to taste, and add a tea-spoon of white sugar, a half cup of sweet cream if you have it, and last stir in the butter and flour; let it boil up and it is ready for the table. Serve with fried bread-chips, or poached eggs one in each dish. -Mrs. H. H. Herbert, Benson,
A pureed vegetable soup finished with a butter-and-flour liaison. The method is sound; only the vessel, a couple of the ingredient terms and the straining step need translating.
- Porcelain kettleThis means an enameled cast-iron or enamelware pot, specified because bare iron or copper discolored acidic tomatoes and gave them a metallic edge. Any nonreactive heavy pot — stainless, enameled cast iron — does the same job.
- One pint tomatoesA pint is roughly 2 cups; in the 1880s this would likely have been home-put-up tomatoes, though a pint of fresh ones stewed down fits the instruction just as well. A 14–15 oz can, simmered ten minutes to concentrate, is a close equivalent.
- Sweet herbsA bundle of parsley, thyme and a bay leaf, tied so it can be pulled out before straining. "Sweet" here means savory-aromatic rather than bitter or medicinal, not sugary.
- Straining through a sieveRubbing three quarts of cooked vegetables through a sieve is the slow part. A food mill gives the same texture with the fibrous cabbage and carrot skins held back; a blender gives a smoother, slightly cloudier soup with nothing left behind.
- Beurre maniéTwo tablespoons butter creamed with one of flour is a raw-flour thickener stirred in at the end. It must boil for a minute or two after it goes in, or the soup tastes of paste. Add it in small pinches to avoid lumps.
- Sweet creamSimply fresh, unsoured cream; the qualifier distinguished it from soured cream, which many kitchens also had on hand. Half a cup of heavy cream is right; add it off a hard boil to keep it from breaking against the tomato.
- Cabbage timingTwenty minutes of boiling would have softened the cabbage enough to press through a sieve. If you are using a blender or food mill, ten minutes is plenty and the soup keeps a fresher flavor.
- YieldThree quarts of water plus the vegetables, less what boils away over the better part of an hour, gives roughly two and a half to three quarts of finished soup, six to eight servings. The poached egg per bowl turns it into a supper rather than a first course.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to a family of late nineteenth-century American compilations built from contributed recipes, each signed with a name and town — here Mrs. H. H. Herbert of Benson. This is the standard household "vegetable soup" of the period: root vegetables and cabbage cooked down in water rather than stock, then pressed through a sieve and enriched at the last minute with butter, flour and cream. The absence of meat is the point. A soup like this cost almost nothing, used the keeping vegetables that filled a winter cellar, and was made substantial by the finishing liaison and by what went into the bowl — fried bread chips, or a poached egg, both standard garnishes for thin soups in Anglo-American cookery. The pint of tomatoes could come either from fresh stewed tomatoes or from a put-up jar, and home canning is often said to be part of what let tomatoes turn up in soup recipes year-round.