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M. a. T (Shred two onions and fry brown)
Shred two onions and fry brown in a half spoon of but ter; add a little mace, salt and pepper; then a spoonful or so of stock; rub a tablespoonful of flour smooth with a little butter and let fry with the onions; strain through a colander, then add more stock if desired; cut turnip, carrot and celery in fillets; add a few green peas; boil tender in a little water and add both water and vegetables to the soup. If wished, the flour can be left out, and it will make a clear light-coloured soup. In that case the onions should be cut in fillets and boiled with the vegetables.
A julienne-style vegetable soup built on a browned onion roux, written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew what she was doing. The quantities of liquid are the weak point: as printed, "a spoonful or so of stock" only wets the roux, and you will need to decide the rest yourself.
- Stock quantityThe recipe never states a total volume. For the amount of thickening given — a tablespoon of flour with butter — something in the region of 1 quart (1 litre) of stock is a reasonable reckoning, added gradually once the onions and flour have browned.
- "A half spoon of butter"Genuinely ambiguous; period spoons ran from teaspoon to serving spoon. Enough butter to fry two shredded onions without scorching is roughly 1 tablespoon, and that is the practical reading.
- Fillets means julienneCutting the turnip, carrot and celery "in fillets" means matchsticks, about 1/8 inch square and an inch or two long. Uniform sticks are the whole point of the dish — this is the family of soups the French call julienne, and ragged chunks change its character entirely.
- The hinge: brown the onions properlyAll the colour and most of the flavour come from frying the onions to a genuine brown before the flour goes in, then letting the flour cook in that fat until it takes colour too. Rushed here, the soup is pale and floury; the recipe's "clear light-coloured" variant exists precisely as the alternative to a browned base.
- StrainingThe recipe says only to strain through a colander, which will hold back the coarser onion; how much of it passes into the soup is left to the cook, and a fine sieve or food mill gives the smoother body a modern palate expects. Do not skip the straining if you want the vegetable sticks to stand out in a clean liquid.
- MaceGround mace is the outer covering of nutmeg, warmer and less sweet. "A little" means about 1/4 teaspoon for a quart; it is easy to overdo and will dominate the celery if you do.
- Cooking the vegetablesBoil the julienne in a small amount of water only until just tender — 5 to 8 minutes for carrot and turnip, less for celery — and add the cooking water with them so nothing is lost. Green peas need 2 to 3 minutes at most; frozen peas can go in at the end off the heat.
- YieldAs reconstructed above, about 1 quart, serving four as a first course.
The Home Cook Book belongs to a distinctly nineteenth-century genre: the compiled charity cookbook, in which contributions were solicited from local housekeepers and printed under their names or, as here, their initials. "M. a. T" is one of those contributors, and the terseness of the entry is typical — it reads as a note between cooks rather than a set of instructions for a beginner, which is why the stock is never measured. The soup itself is a domestic reading of French julienne, the clear vegetable soup whose defining feature is the uniform matchstick cut; the option to leave out the flour and boil the onions with the vegetables is essentially the choice between a brown soup and a clear one, a distinction period cookery took seriously and named accordingly. Mace, now a back-of-the-cupboard spice, was then a standard savoury seasoning for stocks and made-dishes, appearing regularly in soup and meat recipes of the 1870s.