HFF 3.3: Soup

The Challenge: Soups, stews, broths and/or similar dishes.

The Receipt: Apple soup from Beeton's Book of Household Management

The Date/Year and Region: 1861, British (London)

How Did You Make It:  First, I had to make the "medium stock, No. 105" by putting the following items in a pot of  (2 quarts, 1/2 pint) water and letting them simmer for five hours:

10 oz ham
12 oz misc chicken pieces
1.4 lb of cheapest beef at Winco
1 cup water, 1 oz butter
1 huge white onion with 3 cloves
2 carrots
2 tiny radishes  (should have been a turnip)
Half a head of celery (all the leafy bits I don't like in my vegetable stew)
1/4 tsp whole peppercorns
1/8 mace (pounded was all I had)
1 small handful of marjoram, sage, and thyme
1 oz salt (which is a lot)

This is approximately a half-scale of the given receipt. I skipped the leek, as I have none in the garden, and couldn't find one in the store; savory herbs were also limited by what I could find in the garden between snowfalls. I made a mistake in using the radish when I should have had a turnip--I fished these out after 45 minutes, as they had turned the stock pink, causing me to notice my error. The color mellowed a lot after that. The resulting stock is less salty that modern commercial products, and has a hearty meat flavor (I couldn't say, however, whether the beef or chicken was predominating).

To make the apple soup (1/6 scale), I took 1 (5-oz) apple, peeled and cored it, and cut it into five pieces. This was boiled in 1 pint of the aforementioned stock. After the apples were soft, I strained the soup, added 1/8 tsp of white pepper, a dash of cayenne pepper, and 1 clove, and boiled it again.

Time to Complete: About 5.5 hours to make the stock, another hour or two on the soup itself. Most of this is 'wait while the pot stews/simmers' time.

Total Cost: I spent about $6 on the cheapest piece of beef I could find, and another $2 or so on onions, celery and carrots for the stock. This made considerable more stock that I ended up using on this receipt, so 3/4 of it is in the freezer for future use. Everything else, I already had on hand (thanks, in part, to a habit for freezing weird left-overs for Victorian cookery experiments).

How Successful Was It? I messed this one up. The stock is fine, but the soup had problems: I didn't cover the pan while stewing the apples, and ended up reducing the stock volume by three-quarters. The resulting soup was, therefore, much too concentrated, particularly in regards the salt and pepper content. As a result, I probably pulled it off before the apples were sufficiently stewed. While the receipt does not specify, I suspect that I was meant to stew them until they're basically falling apart, and then the sieving step is to remove the apple pulp.

In so far as I can look past the 'too much salt' issue (as the stock itself was fine), I think the savory apple + meat flavor was different, and interesting. I was skeptical about it, but apple and pork combinations can be tasty, so I could see this soup working in the future.


How Accurate Is It? I used a non-period type of apple (honeycrisp), but that's a much smaller consideration than the whole 'reducing stock too much' problem.

Attempting to stew the apples in stock. Can you spot the problems?

One very bowl of very salty soup.