Hungarian Soup
Chop 2 cups of cold roast duck with 1 ounce of parsley, bayleaf, and thyme. Fry in 1 ounce of butter, add 1 ounce flour, then 1 quart of beef stock, and 1/2 pint of white wine or cider. Cook 1 hour. Rub through a sieve, add some pieces of duck and 1 green pepper, sliced and free from seeds and fried in butter, also 1 cup of cooked barley, salt, and pepper to taste.
A leftovers soup built on cold roast duck, thickened with a roux and finished with barley. The one thing to get right is the sieving stage: the hour of simmering is there to soften the meat and herbs enough to push through, and the reserved duck pieces and pepper go in afterward so they keep their texture.
- 1 ounce of herbs is a weightAn ounce of parsley, bay and thyme together is a generous handful of fresh herbs, not a spoonful of dried. Use roughly 1/2 cup chopped parsley, a bay leaf and a few thyme sprigs; if the bay leaf survives to the sieve, fish it out rather than forcing it through.
- Liquid measuresA quart of stock is 4 cups; 1/2 pint of wine or cider is 1 cup by American measure. Some liquid will cook away over the hour, so expect a little less than the five cups of liquid you start with.
- Cider means hard ciderCider probably means hard cider -- The wine-or-cider substitution makes most sense with fermented cider, which was widely drunk when this was written. Sweet supermarket apple juice will throw the soup off balance.
- Roux and scorchingAn ounce of butter is about 2 tablespoons; an ounce of flour is nearer 1/4 cup — still a light roux for the five cups of liquid. Cook it a minute or two with the duck and herbs, then add the stock gradually and off a hard boil, or the flour will lump.
- Rubbing through a sieveThis is the laborious step the original takes for granted. A food mill or a short pulse in a blender followed by a sieve does the same work; the goal is a slightly grainy purée, not a smooth velvet.
- The green pepperA sweet bell pepper, fried in butter until it slackens. Frying rather than boiling is deliberate — it keeps the pepper sweet and gives the soup its only fresh note.
- BarleyOne cup cooked, meaning barley boiled separately until tender and drained. Adding it raw would soak up the liquid and cloud the purée.
- YieldFour to six servings as a first course. Salt hard at the end: leftover roast duck and homemade beef stock vary enormously in seasoning.
The name has less to do with Hungary than with the green pepper, which is often said to have read as Hungarian to English and American cooks — though a genuinely Hungarian soup would lean on paprika, and this one contains none. What the recipe really belongs to is the tradition of the second-day soup: a roast duck was expensive, and a cookbook of this sort might well expect that the carcass and the cold scraps would reappear as purée, thickened with a roux and stretched with stock and barley. The technique of simmering meat with herbs and then rubbing the whole through a sieve is straight out of the French repertoire that dominated Anglo-American cookery writing at the time, before blenders made purées casual.