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Vegetable Soup (After boiling a soup bone)
After boiling a soup bone or piece of beef until done, add to the broth boiling water to make the amount of soup wanted, and when boiling again add a large handful of cabbage cut fine as for slaw, a half pint of tomatoes, canned or fresh; peel and slice and add three large or four small onions, and two or three potatoes (some use a half tea-cup of dried or half pint of green corn; if dried corn is used, it should be soaked). Let boil from half to three-quarters of an hour; if you like a little thickening, stir an egg or yolk with a large spoonful of milk and a tea-spoon of flour, put in five or ten minutes before taking off; this makes it very rich. Serve with crackers. -Mrs. H. C. Vosbury.
A frugal second-day soup built on the liquid left from boiling a beef bone. The recipe assumes you already have that broth; everything else is quick.
- Skim and degrease firstThe recipe takes for granted that you have boiled the bone or beef separately. Chill the broth if you have time and lift the fat cap off, or skim it hot — a soup this lean tastes muddy under a heavy layer of beef fat.
- Half a pint of tomatoesHalf a tea-cup of dried corn -- One cup, roughly half a standard 14.5 oz can of tomatoes with their juice, or two medium fresh tomatoes chopped. Home canning of the period commonly used pint and quart jars.
- Half a tea-cup of dried cornPeriod teacups varied, generally reckoned at four to six ounces by volume, so somewhere between a quarter cup and a scant half cup of dried corn. It wants a soak in warm water — an hour or more, or overnight — before it goes in; unsoaked it stays leathery. Half a pint of green corn is one cup of fresh or frozen kernels.
- Cabbage cut fine as for slawShredded thin, not chunked. At the stated boil of thirty to forty-five minutes cabbage of any cut goes soft and sulphurous; modern practice would add it in the last fifteen minutes.
- The timing is long by current standardsHalf to three-quarters of an hour at a boil will reduce the potatoes and onions to a soft, blended mass; the recipe evidently does not aim at distinct vegetables. If you want the potato to keep its shape, cut it large and give it twenty-five minutes at a bare simmer.
- The egg thickeningAn egg or yolk beaten with a tablespoon of milk and a teaspoon of flour, added five to ten minutes before serving. Temper it: whisk a ladle of hot broth into the egg mixture first, then stir it back into the pot off a hard boil, or it will scramble into threads.
- SaltNone is called for, on the assumption the meat broth was already seasoned. Taste before serving; unsalted beef broth diluted with boiling water needs a good deal.
- YieldDepends entirely on how much water you add — the recipe says "the amount of soup wanted." The vegetable quantities given suit roughly two to three quarts, serving six to eight.
This is a leftovers recipe dressed as a recipe, and its logic is the logic of a household that bought meat on the bone. The boiled beef or soup bone was the main dish of one meal; the broth it left behind became the next, stretched with boiling water to whatever volume the table required. Cabbage, onion, potato and corn are the winter-keeping vegetables of a Midwestern or Southern larder, and the note that tomatoes may be "canned or fresh" places the book squarely in the era when home canning had made summer produce a year-round proposition. The Dixie Cook Book, like many regional compilations of the 1880s and 1890s, was assembled from contributions signed by name — Mrs. H. C. Vosbury here — which is why the instructions read like one cook talking to another rather than like a formula: the parenthetical "some use" is the sound of a community recipe accommodating disagreement.