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Puree, Oriental
Finely slice a small onion, four shallots, a green pepper, bean garlic, twelve well-washed fresh okras, the meat of the eggplant from lunch, a quarter-pound piece peeled and seeded pumpkin and six small, peeled Jerusalem artichokes. Place these ingredients in a soup pot with an ounce butter and a teaspoon curry powder, cook over a brisk fire for fifteen minutes, frequently stirring with a wooden spoon meanwhile. Add a half pint fresh crushed tomatoes, moisten with three quarts water, the milk and grated fibres (meat) of a medium cocoanut and a two-ounce piece dried, crushed bacon. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, sprig thyme, bay leaf and two cloves. Cover pot and let simmer on corner of range for two and a half hours, being careful to mix once in a while. Remove, press puree through sieve into a vessel, then through Chinese strainer into a soup tureen, and serve with a plate of bread croutons separately.
A thrifty vegetable soup built on leftover eggplant and a whole fresh coconut, then pushed through two sieves until it is smooth. Most of the work is in the straining, and the flavour depends on frying the curry powder with the vegetables before any liquid goes in.
- "Bean garlic"Almost certainly a clove of garlic; the odd phrasing may be a translation artefact, but the route is guesswork. One large clove suits the quantity; the phrase is genuinely ambiguous, so treat it as a minimum rather than a fixed amount.
- The hinge: dry-fry the curryThe hinge: fry the curry in butter -- The fifteen minutes of brisk cooking with butter and curry powder before any liquid is added is what separates this from a raw-tasting soup. Keep the pot moving; the powder scorches quickly and a burnt note carries through three quarts of broth.
- MeasuresHalf a pint of crushed tomatoes is one cup, or roughly a 14-oz tin drained of its thinnest juice. An ounce of butter is two tablespoons. Three quarts of water is 2.8 litres — a large pot.
- CoconutCracking, grating and pressing a fresh coconut yields roughly a cup of liquid and several cups of grated meat, depending on the nut. One 400 ml tin of full-fat coconut milk plus a cup of unsweetened desiccated coconut is a reasonable stand-in, since both milk and fibre are strained out at the end anyway.
- "Dried, crushed bacon"This means hard, dry-cured salt pork or slab bacon, chopped fine — a seasoning, not a garnish. Two ounces of pancetta or a thick piece of streaky bacon rind works; if the bacon is heavily salted, hold back some of the teaspoon of salt until the end.
- Leftover eggplant"The meat of the eggplant from lunch" assumes a cooked, scooped-out eggplant, about a cup of flesh. Roast a medium eggplant until collapsed and scrape it out if you have no leftovers.
- Heat and time"A brisk fire" is medium-high; "the corner of the range" is the coolest spot, meaning the barest simmer for the two and a half hours. The recipe says to cover the pot.
- StrainingA "Chinese strainer" is a chinois, the conical fine-mesh sieve. Push through a coarse sieve first to break down the vegetables, then through fine mesh to catch coconut fibre and okra strings — skipping the second pass leaves the soup gritty. A blender before the sieve saves considerable labour.
- YieldAbout two and a half quarts after reduction, enough for eight to ten as a first course. The croutons are served alongside, not floated in.
Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) organises thousands of recipes by name, and "Oriental" in that vocabulary was elastic to the point of meaninglessness — here it signals curry powder and coconut, the two ingredients that in turn-of-the-century dining rooms stood in for everything east of Suez. The vegetables themselves tell a different and more interesting story: okra, pumpkin, green pepper, tomato and Jerusalem artichoke are a New World and West African cast, closer to a Creole soup than to anything Asian, and Filippini had cooked for decades at Delmonico's in New York. The instruction to use "the eggplant from lunch" is the most period detail on the page: a professional purée soup was also a way of finishing yesterday's vegetables, and the double straining through sieve and chinois is exactly the restaurant discipline that made leftovers presentable in a tureen.