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Turnip Soup (Pare and chop quart of turnips)
Pare and chop 1 quart of turnips, fry in 2 ounces butter or suet, add half a spoonful of sugar and some parsley, and 1 pint consomme. Cook 3/4 hour. Make six slices of toast, pour the turnips, well seasoned, into a dish, lay the toast over, dot with butter, and bake 1/2 hour. This is served in Rouen with a tureen of hot consomme and a tablespoonful given on each plate, but it can also be made into one broth, cooking the turnips in the whole amount of stock, pressing them through a sieve and putting toast on top, when serving. Is excellent made of rabbit stock, instead of beef.
VEGETABLE SOUP (made in France, during Lent.).
Fry 2 carrots, 2 turnips, 2 onions, 1/2 pint string beans, 1 leek, 1 cup of spinach with some parsley and a bit of celery, in 2 ounces butter. Add 1 ounce flour, 1 quart, and a pint of milk, 1 pint of stewed tomatoes, and a pinch of baking soda, also a blade of mace. Simmer for 2 hours, press through a sieve, add a teaspoonful of sugar, a little butter blended with flour, and 2 tablespoonfuls each of cooked rice and peas.
TOMATO SOUP (as made in Germany.).
Cut up 1 pound of veal from the breast, add the bones and 1 ounce butter, 1 onion, and 1 carrot, and 3 quarts water, parsley, salt, and pepper, 1 pint tomatoes and 1 green pepper, cut up and free from seeds. Cook 3 hours, add a spoonful of sugar and 1 cup of boiled rice.
Three linked entries: a Rouen turnip dish that is half soup and half gratin, a Lenten vegetable purée, and a German veal-and-tomato broth. The turnip recipe is the one that needs the most translating, since it moves from stovetop to oven without ever naming a temperature.
- A quart of turnipsChopped, that is roughly 1.25 to 1.5 lb of trimmed turnips, three or four medium ones; the wording leaves it unclear whether the quart is measured before or after paring. Use white turnips rather than swede/rutabaga; the sugar in the recipe reads as a lift for the vegetable rather than a sweetener.
- The unnamed ovenFor the final half hour, set the oven to 350F. The dish is already cooked at that point — the baking is to dry the surface and crisp the buttered toast, so watch the top rather than the clock.
- ConsomméA clarified, well-reduced beef stock. Ordinary unsalted stock works, but reduce it a little first; only a pint goes into the turnips, so it carries most of the savour. The Rouen service — a tureen of hot consommé, a tablespoonful per plate — is a moistening spoon, not a soup course.
- SuetBeef suet gives the older, richer version; shredded packet suet or rendered beef fat both work. Butter is the easier choice and is what most cooks will want here.
- "Half a spoonful" and "a spoonful"The page mixes unqualified "spoonfuls" with named teaspoons and tablespoons. An unqualified "spoonful" in books of this date often meant a tablespoon, so reading these as teaspoons is an editorial choice; start small, since the sugar is a seasoning against acidity and bitterness, not a sweetener.
- A missing unit in the vegetable soup"1 ounce flour, 1 quart, and a pint of milk" has plainly lost a word. The quart is almost certainly stock or water. Treat the liquid as 1 quart stock plus 1 pint milk and adjust at the sieving stage.
- The pinch of baking sodaIt is there to blunt the acid of the tomatoes so the milk does not curdle. Keep it to a genuine pinch — more will flatten the flavour, give a soapy edge, and soften the vegetables to mush. Adding the milk at the end, off a hard boil, does the same job with less risk.
- Blade of maceThe dried aril that covers the nutmeg seed, sold as whole blades or ground. Blades vary, but one is somewhere in the region of a quarter to a half teaspoon of ground mace; fish out the whole blade before sieving.
- Rabbit stockThe suggestion is a good one and still holds. Farmed rabbit gives a pale, delicate stock that suits turnips better than beef, though it needs firmer salting.
- YieldThe turnip dish, with its six slices of toast, serves six as a first course. Each soup starts from around two to three quarts of liquid and, after long simmering, will serve six.
Adelaide Keen's With a Saucepan Over the Sea (1902) was one of a run of turn-of-the-century American books that collected "foreign" dishes for home cooks, and its habit of tagging recipes by city was the whole point of the exercise: the reader was meant to feel she was travelling. The Rouen turnip dish sits on the border between soup and gratin, a form common across northern France where bread was used to thicken and bulk a thin broth long before it became a garnish, and the vegetable is served with only a spoonful of consommé per plate. The Lenten soup is a reminder that the fast was widely understood in France as a meat fast rather than a dairy one, which is why butter and a pint of milk sit comfortably in it, while the German tomato soup is another matter.