A Stock of Soups

by Helen Gaffney

Soup is not only one of the most enjoyable and reviving foods that can be made; it is also, with timesavers and modern kitchens, one of the easiest. It can be used for absolutely any and every occasion. A bowl of thick pea soup is a great comfort for a cold child coming in from outside, and clear broth, such as the one eaten at Court in Queen Anne's day, is a perfect reviver for people who have stayed up too late. On a hot and heavy summer's day iced tomato soup, or 'tomata' as it used to be called, is deliciously refreshing.

Of course, British soups have not always had a particularly good reputation and there have been hard times, when 'kidley brose' or 'kettle broth' was all the villagers could afford to eat - a piece of toast in a bowl with boiling water poured over, seasoned with a pinch of salt. By the end of the nineteenth century it was very much the done thing for the ladies of the big house to hand out soup, brewed weekly, to the poor - one manuscript book suggests boiling up kitchen scraps, plate scrapings, even fish bones and lumps of broken bread. Poor poor. However, at Court and at the tables of the grand houses, soup had long ago left the area of large pieces of this and that boiled up in a pot and had reached a high level of refinement. Turtle soup, or mock turtle or even imitation mock turtle soup (if you were really trying to keep up appearances), was a regular feature. There are many old engravings showing turtles - some actually hanging in rows from the kitchen beams alongside deer and pheasants.

The well-known early nineteenth century cookery-book writer Eliza Acton, predecessor of Mrs. Beeton, was an avid supporter of soups. Her recipes are among the first and are ones that we still enjoy today. They detailed delicate vegetable soups, pearly white soups thickened with almonds and also fish soups; the latter has now almost vanished from our tables with the exception of Cornish crab. It was about this time that the first short cuts in soup making started to appear - for example, there were recipes published for an early form of stock cube called 'portable soup', which was stock highly concentrated by boiling until it became a stiff glue. It was then cut into squares and could be kept for years. Captain Cook, in fact, took something similar on his voyage to Australia and a lump of it still sits in Greenwich, proof of its wonderfully enduring qualities. A shaving was recently scraped off and diluted and was evidently as good (or just as bearable) as ever!

Nowadays stock cubes sit on the shelf of almost every kitchen cupboard and save many a cook's life, although of course for more interesting flavours itís best to make fresh stock at home. However, time is not always on the side of the cook. Fortunately there are a few decent canned soups - oxtail, tomato and thick pea - as well as stock cubes, refrigerators and liquidisers to take the hours out of soup making. In addition many chilled, fresh stocks and soups are available in the supermarkets these days. We are lucky to have all these aids and it would be a pity not to take advantage of them and eat better soups than before.

A Word About The Stockpot

The old Victorian stockpot has gone by the board. If you want freshness of flavour, it is no longer a good idea to keep popping new bits and pieces into the same pot. Even in its heyday this pot was a repository for every leftover that came along: beef, lamb, vegetables, even fish were kept bubbling away perpetually on the side of the stove The resulting brew, strained and boiled, went into the dull brown soups and sauces of the era, Brown Windsor and Espagnole for example, tasting of mutton fat and flour.

Today we prefer to make a stock with fresh ingredients and use it within a day or two, or freeze it to use later. The reasons for bothering to do such a thing at all, when useful stock cubes are sitting in the cupboard ready to add any extra flavour that a soup might require, are not immediately clear. However, by making stock with fresh vegetables, a new fresh flavour is created, so that each soup made at home has a subtly different taste - much more interesting than the same concentrated stock cube flavour every time, useful though they may be. Two popular fresh stocks for soup-making are chicken and beef.