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Another Soup for Suet
Mrs. G. B. Wyllie.
One tea-cup pearl barley in about one pint cold water, bring to the boil till it swells, boil in a tin pail, in hot water, four quarts milk, put in your barley and keep simmering for three or four hours, add, then serving, one teaspoonful of salt.
A barley-and-milk gruel of the invalid-cookery school: almost no seasoning, very long cooking, and a deliberately bland result. The whole method hinges on the tin pail set in hot water, which is a double boiler and the only thing keeping four quarts of milk from scorching.
- The double boiler is not optional"boil in a tin pail, in hot water" means a pail standing in a pot of simmering water. Milk held at a simmer for three hours over direct heat will catch and taste burnt; over water it cannot get hotter than the water around it.
- A tea-cupIn this period a tea-cup is roughly 6 fl oz, so about three-quarters of a modern cup of pearl barley. That is a small amount of grain for four quarts of milk, and the result is a thin drinking soup rather than a porridge.
- Two stages, not oneThe barley is first swelled in a pint of cold water brought to the boil, then added to the hot milk. The recipe does not say whether to drain it; adding it with its starchy water gives a thicker soup.
- Cooking timeThree to four hours is longer than modern pearl barley needs; it is usually tender in 45 minutes to an hour. An hour and a half in the double boiler gives a fully thickened soup without reducing the milk to sweetness.
- Salt at the endThe teaspoon of salt goes in only at serving. A single teaspoon in four quarts is very lightly seasoned by current taste; season to taste at the table.
- Stirring and skinMilk held that long will form a skin and the barley will settle. Keep the pail covered and stir every 20 minutes, scraping the bottom, or the grain sinks into a solid layer.
- YieldFour quarts of milk plus a pint of water makes roughly four and a half quarts of soup — twelve to sixteen servings, or a day's worth of feeding for a household or a sickroom. Halve or quarter it freely; the proportions scale directly.
- On the titleThe title does not match the recipe: there is no suet in it.
Barley boiled in milk is one of the oldest items in the English-speaking invalid kitchen, and it survives in nineteenth-century household books almost unchanged: grain, milk, long slow heat, a little salt at the last minute. Pearl barley — hulled and polished until the bran and much of the germ are gone — was valued precisely because it was mild and easy to digest, and it was recommended for children, convalescents and nursing mothers well into the twentieth century. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in the 1870s from contributions by named ladies of the city and generally described as the first Canadian community cookbook, carries a run of these plain milk soups alongside its richer company dishes; recipes credited to individual subscribers like Mrs. G. B. Wyllie were the book's whole method of assembly. The instruction to cook in a tin pail set in hot water is a reminder that the household's heat source was a wood or coal range, where surrounding a pot with water was one of several ways to hold something below the boil for hours, alongside the cool end or the back of the stove.