Creole Soup
Use one pound of beef, it must be the hock of the beef or a marrow bone, with the meat (for eight persons); place this on the fire, with three quarts of water, a tablespoonful of salt, and red pepper to taste. Let this boil hard for four hours; after it has boiled well, add one small leaf of tender cabbage, chopped fine, a carrot cut in small pieces, some onion tops, a large roasted onion, a teacupful of tomatoes; let this boil for an hour more, then set back of the stove to simmer; add a teacupful of vermicelli or a tablespoonful of rice, let boil until done.
A long-boiled beef broth finished with vegetables and a starch — straightforward, but the original assumes a coal range and a few vessels and terms that have shifted. Two things matter most: the meat should be a collagen-rich cut, and the pot should never actually boil hard for four hours.
- The cut"Hock of the beef" is the shin or shank, the same cut sold today as beef shank cross-cut, marrow bone included. One pound of it with three quarts of water is a thin broth by modern standards; two pounds gives a soup with real body without changing anything else.
- Boil hard, or simmerFour hours of hard boiling will emulsify the fat, cloud the broth and shred the meat to threads. Bring it to a boil, skim the grey foam that rises in the first ten minutes, then hold it at a bare simmer — a lazy bubble every second or two — for the same four hours.
- TeacupfulIn American books of this period a teacup is usually reckoned at about three-quarters of a cup, smaller than a coffee cup. So roughly 6 fl oz of tomatoes and a scant 6 fl oz of dry vermicelli by volume (far less than 6 oz by weight). A tablespoon of raw rice is genuinely small for eight servings; 2 dash3 tablespoons is closer to what the finished soup wants.
- A large roasted onionProbably not sweated in fat, but an onion roasted or charred until the outside darkens, then peeled and dropped in whole. Read that way it contributes colour and a faint bitterness, and it is worth doing rather than skipping.
- Onion topsThe green tops of spring onions or scallions. Add them in the last few minutes rather than for the full hour, or they turn drab and lose the point.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not black pepper. Start with an eighth of a teaspoon in three quarts and adjust at the end; the heat concentrates as the liquid reduces.
- TomatoesCanned tomatoes were widely available by this date and work perfectly here. Break them up with a spoon; they need the hour of cooking the recipe gives them.
- The starch, lastVermicelli needs 5–8 minutes and rice 15–20, so add them once the soup is off the hard boil and eat within the hour. Pasta or rice left sitting in hot broth swells, softens and drinks the liquid.
- YieldEight servings, as stated, though the pot will have reduced considerably over four hours of open cooking. Top up with hot water if it has fallen much below two quarts before the vegetables go in.
"Creole" as a recipe label often signals New Orleans in a general way rather than a specific Louisiana household, and this soup fits that pattern: it is a plain beef shin broth, given its regional label by the red pepper, the tomatoes, the onion tops and the roasted onion. The roasted or scorched onion is often said to be a Creole and Cajun habit, used to darken and deepen a broth, and versions of it are traditionally traced across the Gulf coast and in Spanish and French colonial cooking generally. The choice of vermicelli or rice is telling too — both were pantry staples in New Orleans. The four-hour extraction of a single pound of shank for eight people marks this as a thrift recipe, the kind of dish built on a cheap cut and a long fire that a range kept burning all day made effectively free.