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Turnip Soup (Northern Italy Pare slice)
(Northern Italy.) Pare, slice, and fry 1 1/2 quarts of turnips, with 1 tablespoonful sugar, 2 ounces butter, and 2 ounces flour. Add 1 pint of tomatoes, parsley, bayleaf, and thyme. Simmer 1 hour, press through a sieve. Add 1 cup of hot beef stock and a tablespoonful of grated cheese, salt, and pepper.
A short, blunt set of directions that assumes you know how a roux behaves. The one thing to watch is liquid: as written there is very little of it, and turnips plus flour plus butter will catch on the pan bottom long before the hour is up.
- The hinge: add liquid before you simmerA pint of tomatoes will not carry 1 1/2 quarts of floured turnip through an hour of simmering. Add water or light stock to cover the vegetables by an inch, then reduce after sieving if it is too thin.
- 1 1/2 quarts of turnipsThis is a volume measure of sliced turnip, roughly 2 to 2 1/4 lb whole. Use white or purple-top turnips; swede/rutabaga is sweeter and heavier and will dominate the tomato.
- "Fry" here means sweat and brown lightlyButter, sugar and turnip over medium heat until the edges take colour, then stir in the flour and cook it a minute or two. The tablespoon of sugar most likely helps caramelisation and blunts the turnip's bitterness rather than sweetening the soup, though the recipe does not say.
- 1 pint of tomatoesRead this as home-canned or fresh peeled tomatoes with their juice; a 14-16 oz tin of whole peeled tomatoes is the direct equivalent.
- HerbsNo quantities are given. Tie a few parsley stalks, one bay leaf and a sprig of thyme together so you can lift them out before sieving.
- "Press through a sieve"A food mill or blender does this in seconds. If you blend, pass it once through a fine sieve anyway, as turnip fibre stays stringy.
- Stock and cheeseOne cup of hot beef stock is the finishing addition, not the cooking liquid. Stir the grated cheese in off the heat so it melts without turning grainy; the recipe specifies only "grated cheese", though a hard grating cheese is the likeliest reading.
- YieldRoughly 1 to 1 1/2 quarts finished soup depending on how much liquid you add and reduce, serving four to six as a first course.
This carries a bare regional label rather than a dish name, which is characteristic of a genre of travel cookery books in which an English-speaking author collected dishes country by country and presented them as souvenirs of a journey. The method is a plain vegetable purée: a butter-and-flour thickening, an hour's simmer, a sieve, a spoonful of cheese to finish. Turnips were a northern Italian winter staple long before the tomato arrived, and cheap root vegetables stretched with broth are a familiar northern pattern.