Turkey Soup
(Rouen.) Chop the dark meat of a turkey, add the gravy, bones, skin, and stuffing, 1 cup of bread-crumbs, an onion, some parsley, and 2 quarts of water. Cook 3 hours, add salt and pepper, nutmeg, 1/2 cup of boiling milk, mixed with a little butter and flour, and press through a sieve.
TCHI. (Russian Soup.).
Make 1 pound of sausage meat into small balls and fry them brown. Chop 2 large onions and the heart of a cabbage, fry them in butter or suet, add 2 ounces flour, salt, pepper, parsley, and 3 pints of stock. Cook 1 hour, add the sausage balls, and 1 glass of tarragon vinegar.
Two unrelated soups run together in a single paragraph here, as often happens in this book: a French leftover-turkey soup and tchi, the cabbage soup better known now as shchi. Read them as separate recipes.
- Order of operations in the turkey soupAs written the milk-and-flour liaison goes in before sieving, which means straining a thickened soup through a sieve — slow and wasteful. Strain first, pressing the solids hard to get the body out of the bones and stuffing, then return the liquid to the pan and whisk in the hot milk beaten with a tablespoon of flour and a tablespoon of butter. Simmer a few minutes to cook out the raw flour taste.
- The stuffing is the seasoningLeftover sage-and-onion or plain bread stuffing carries a good deal of the flavour and some of the thickening; the recipe does not say how much to use (the cup measure belongs to the bread-crumbs). If your stuffing was heavy on sage, hold back on the nutmeg; if you have no stuffing left, add a bay leaf and a stalk of celery to compensate.
- Quantities and yieldTwo quarts of water will reduce over three hours, perhaps to something near a quart and a half — about six modest servings. The shchi, on 3 pints of stock plus a pound of sausage, gives roughly six small bowls as well.
- "A glass" of tarragon vinegarA wine glass in period usage is about 1/4 cup, and that is a lot of acid to add at once. Add half, taste, then add the rest. Tarragon vinegar is still sold; plain white wine vinegar with a sprig of tarragon steeped in it for an hour does the same job.
- 2 ounces of flourBy weight, a scant 1/2 cup — a heavy hand for 3 pints of stock. Use the full amount for a soup you can stand a spoon in, half for something closer to broth.
- SuetBeef suet gives the frying fat a savoury weight that butter does not. Any rendered beef fat works; failing that use butter with a spoonful of the sausage fat left in the pan.
- "The heart of a cabbage"The pale dense centre of a green or Savoy head, roughly 1 to 1.5 lb once the outer leaves are stripped. Frying it in the fat before the stock goes in is the point of the method — it sweetens the cabbage and keeps the soup from smelling sulphurous over an hour's cooking.
- The sausage ballsBrown them, then set them aside and add them only at the end as directed. An hour in the pot would leach them dry; ten minutes in the finished soup is enough to heat them through.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea collects dishes the author gathered on the Continent and tags each with the city it came from, which is why a plain turkey soup arrives labelled Rouen. The second recipe, printed here as TCHI, is shchi, the cabbage soup long central to Russian home cooking and often called the country's national dish; the word appears in English-language cookbooks of the period in several spellings, none of them settled. The version given is a comparatively rich one, with sausage, a flour thickening and a finish of tarragon vinegar standing in for the sour cabbage brine or smetana that would sharpen it in a Russian kitchen.