As promised, I present a recipe suitable for Lent: this one comes from Hannah Glasse’s 1747 book - The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy - and is a “Turnip Soop.” She includes it in her section: “For a Fast-Dinner, a Number of good Dishes, which you may make use of for a Table at any other Time.” It is fairly simple in terms of method, though there are a number of steps and ingredients. One interesting thing from a food history perspective is that it includes vermicella (vermicelli) amongst the ingredients. I will provide my recipes: one for the soup and one for the pasta, for which Glasse includes her own instructions elsewhere in the book. I will follow that with an explanation of my adaptions and a bit of history, including some about the Italian paste (pasta) in England.
Recipes
“A Turnip Soop”
Ingredients
- 1500g (about 5 medium) turnips, divided
- 3 medium onions, divided
- 24 whole cloves
- 4 litres of water
- 15g peppercorns (see Notes)
- 1 tsp nutmeg
- ½ tsp mace
- Sweet herbs (I used ¼ tsp each of dried thyme, rosemary, marjoram, and mint)
- 100g of bread crust or course breadcrumbs
- 250g (about 4 large stalks) of celery, sliced small
- 110g (2 to 3 small) carrots, diced
- 5 tsp of butter, divided
- 1 tbsp of flour
- 80 g of vermicelli (see recipe below)
- Salt to taste (I used 1 ½ tsp)
Instructions
Peel and roughly chop about 2/3 of your turnips (1kg).
Peel one of your onions, cut it in half and stick the 24 cloves in the halves.
Put your turnips, clove-stuck onion, peppercorns, nutmeg, mace, sweet herbs and bread crust into your water in a very large stockpot over high heat. See Notes.
Bring to a boil and keep at a rapid boil for 1 hour.
Into a very large bowl, carefully drain the stock through a heavy-duty coarse sieve or colander. (Use anything that is very sturdy with holes small enough to keep the peppercorns from passing through.) Wash the pot and return the stock to it.
From the remaining solids, pick out any peppercorns and cloves you can easily find. With a wooden spoon or specialised pestle press all the solids you can, except the peppercorns and cloves, through the sieve into the bowl. The turnip will be very soft, but it will still take some work. When finished, spoon the puree you have made into the pot with the stock.
Put the pot back on a burner on medium high heat.
As it is heating, peel and dice the rest of your turnips.
Placed your celery, half of your carrots and half of your diced turnip into the stock in the pot.
Bring to boil and then reduce heat to medium low to keep it simmering.
Peel and slice thinly your two remaining onions.
In a frying pan, on medium low heat, melt 2 tsp of your butter.
Fry your onions slowly until they are brown and well caramelised. Add to your simmering soup.
In a small bowl, combine remaining carrots and turnip. Add your flour and toss to combine.
Wash your frying pan and melt the remaining 3 tsp of butter on medium heat.
Fry your carrot/turnip mixture, stirring and scraping the bottom of the pan constantly so the flour does not burn. Cook about five minutes until your vegetables are browned slightly.
Check to make sure your celery and turnips in the pot are almost tender. If so, turn heat up to high and bring the soup to a good boil.
Add your fried carrot and turnip, as well as your vermicelli.
Cook for about 4 minutes more until vermicelli is tender. (This is for my homemade vermicelli; for fine purchased vermicelli, it will be quicker.)
Taste your soup and add salt.
“To make Vermicella.”
Makes about 80g of pasta
Ingredients
- 50g of flour plus more for dusting
- 2 egg yolks
Instructions
Place flour in a small pile on a clean work surface and make a well in it.
Pour egg yolks into the well.
With a fork, beat the egg slightly and then working in expanding circles, slowly incorporate the flour until a dough is formed.
Scrape the rest of the flour and egg off the surface with the fork. With your hands, work it all into a smooth dough. If it will not come together, add just a drop or two of water.
Clean and dry your surface then lightly flour it.
Roll out your dough as thin as possible.
Lift the thin sheet and lightly flour the surface again.
Allow the sheet to dry on the surface for about 2 hours, turning over after an hour.
On a cutting board, with a very sharp knife, slice the dough into as thin noodles as possible.
Gather and dust with a little more flour. Cover with a towel and reserve.
Notes
In adapting these recipes, I tried to stay pretty close to the historical instructions as written. Glasse provides some quantities and detailed instructions, so that made it fairly easy to do so with a lot of the recipe. I tried to match the measurements and generally succeeded with some minor exceptions.
I did use more vermicelli than the 1 ounce called for, as I wanted to use up all I made with the smallest batch I thought I could work with.
Along similar lines, I make the assumption that the turnips she is talking about are quite a bit smaller than modern turnips. For the second half of the recipe, she says to “save three or four out” of a bunch; with the turnips I had, I thought 3 or 4, as a portion of a bunch, would mean too many turnips for the gallon of water listed. It is similar when she called for “a bunch of salary” (celery), an entire modern bunch would be too much.
The amount of cloves, butter, flour and the amount and type of “sweet herbs” I included were down to my judgement.
For the ratio of egg yolks to flour in the vermicelli, I went from a basic modern pasta recipe.
In making the vermicelli, I ended up following Glasse’s basic method. She does provide an alternative: “though the best way is to run it through a coarse Sieve, whilst the Paste is soft.” I did try this with an initial batch but could not get it to push through and make noodles with the sieve I had.
While being labour intensive and finnicky, the pasta made with her recipe handled quite well and tasted like basic pasta. Overall, the soup is good. Unless you like pepper a lot, I strongly recommend reducing the amount of peppercorns in the stock. It hit pretty hard at the end of each bite. That said, the underlying flavour is rich for a vegetarian dish, probably down to the spicing and herbs. It is hearty with the bread, flour and pureed turnips and there are some interesting textures of turnip going on: the main vegetables being cooked three different ways.
Some Historical Thoughts
One historical note on the soup is how it is thickened. This is from 1747 and you can see two very different thickening methods used by Glasse in her recipe. One – a crust of bread, boiled – is very medieval, while the other, an almost roux – the flour fried with butter on the last turnips and carrots you add – is more modern. La Varenne in the Le Cuisinier françois (1651) was writing about types of roux in French cuisine almost 100 years earlier. For me, this shows English cookery maintaining older flavours and methods longer than France while, at the same time, not being able to ignore their neighbour's innovations.
As I indicated, the most interesting historical thing about this recipe for me is that it calls for vermicella/i. It is not, seemingly, something that is prevalent in English cuisine in the coming centuries, but Glasse uses it in a number of recipes. Also, in her recipe for it, she says, in passing, that the pasta was imported to England at that time. She ends her instructions for making it by saying: “This far exceeds what comes from abroad being fresher.”
Vermicelli was known to at least some in England over 100 years earlier. A London lawyer, judge and sometimes dramatist named Sir Ralph Freeman penned a tragic play called Imperiale in 1639. The story is set in Italy, Genoa specifically, so that maybe goes some way in accounting for the foods mentioned. In it there is a change of leadership and an underling - a cook - rejoices at this, seeing it as an opportunity to express his culinary creativity. Speaking of himself in the third person he says: “Now the Cooke may show his skill; Since I came hither, I have been confin'd to several salads, porridge with scraped cheese, and a few Vermicelle, such slight dishes: O when I serv'd the Grand-Dukes master Cooke, how we were all employd!” Thus, the pasta was known as a simple dish to at least this English author.
There are other references to vermicelli in the seventeenth century, but Glasse’s is the earliest recipe I have found so far for the pasta itself – as simple as it - in English cookery books. Next week, I will probably stay with the eighteenth century and fast-day dishes, while making a passing reference to another pasta – macaroni - and a famous American-ish song that mentions it.
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