The English Kitchen - Soup
168 pp; 138 x 187 mm; illustrations; paperback
ISBN 1-903018-08-0 £8.99
THE ENGLISH KITCHEN is a series of
short monographs and anthologies
exploring the course of English cookery
over the last 300 years.
Trifle was the first volume.
Eileen White is an historian who has worked mainly in the fields of
early English drama and the history of food. She edited 'Feeding
a City: York' and 'The English Cookery Book: Historical Essays', also
published by Prospect Books, and she is closely involved in the Leeds Symposium
on Food History. She lives in Yorkshire.
Soup was never intended as a stand-alone disk. At its first showing
it was merely the broth from a stew: the meat served in one dish, the liquid
in another - we are familiar with the idea from the French pot-au-feu
or bouillabaisse. And the very word 'soup' referred to the 'sops'
of bread put at the bottom of the dish to soak up or thicken the liquor.
These are just two of the intriguing facts to be learned from this
anthology of writings and recipes from the heyday of English cookery up
to the end of Victorian times; What's more, the myriad flavours of modern
soups are something truly new: brown soup, green soup and white soup were
just about the limit of invention in the eighteenth century, even if they
did know about 'portable' or 'pocket' soup cubes, anticipating our packets
and our pots. Eileen White has selected texts that explain the place of
soup in our diet, and which offer recipes which can be tried today (and
just a few that are better to read than to cook).
Click here to display Chapter 1 in Acrobat
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