How to Make Cucumber Soup — The Victorian Way

Ah, hello. I hope you're enjoying the warmer weather. Today, I'm making cucumber soup, a light soup ideal for a summer luncheon or dinner. For this recipe, you will need cucumbers, onion or shallot, stock, salt, cayenne pepper, arrowroot or rice flour, cream and parsley. You may be surprised to see me make use of fresh produce when it's properly in season. So often we work with things that are out of season for the family's table. Although cucumbers are hardly every day, they require a great deal of care to grow and are hard to cultivate without a hothouse. This recipe comes from Eliza Acton and shows what a great writer she really is. For it says you need eight to twenty cucumbers. This is a great disparity of numbers, she writes, but some regard must be made to expense where the vegetable cannot be obtained with facility. We can get plenty of cucumbers and so I am using twenty. Sylvia has already peeled them and I am slicing them, scooping out the seeds and then chopping them. And then I will cover them with salt to draw out the moisture and the bitterness and increase the flavour. When I was younger, there were only two types of cucumber, small for pickling and larger ones which were kept on the vine until they were quite bitter. Modern varieties are much sweeter. Although I still believe they should be cooked. There, I'll leave these for about an hour and then drain them. Now I'm going to make my soup. I'm going to cover it with a good stock and a pinch of cayenne pepper. Here at Audley End House, we always have at least four stocks ready to use. A good clarified veal stock, a more flavoursome dark beef stock, a more general all-purpose gravy and a stock for the servants. Stocks are the basis for all soups and sauces and so if you count yourself as a good cook, your stocks must be superlative. Now that my cucumber is tender, the soup needs to be tammed. If there was a large amount of soup, then I would get Sylvia and Annie to squeeze it through a coarse muslin. But as there's only a small amount, I'll put it through this fine sieve. Passing cucumbers through a sieve is easy as cucumbers are soft. I remember when I was first a maid, one of the hardest jobs to do was to make force meat because it needed to be pounded in a pestle and mortar and then pushed through a sieve. Coarser and more robust than this one but the principle was the same. All maids have to learn how to force meat and vegetables through a sieve to make a fine puree. Of course you could use a mincing machine but they are rather messy and for meat they create a nasty texture. Mincing machines have a place but they are in a butcher's shop or a cat's meat factory. There, now it's time to thicken my soup. Here I have cream with some arrowroot in it. Arrowroot comes from the roots of different kinds of vegetables I think. The French call it toulamois. It's ideal for thickening soups especially if you want to keep them clear unlike rice flour or corn flour. It's very delicate and preferred by ladies or those with delicate constitutions. I'm going to mix it in and then heat it through very slowly. It mustn't boil. The cucumbers won't thicken the soup at all so you have to add something. Cucumbers have always been popular. I read somewhere that we were eating them back in the Tudor times. I certainly have a lot of recipes for them and some of them date back to the last century. Lots of different ways of cooking cucumber. I'd like to try the one where you stuff a cucumber with a de-boned pigeon but that's very old-fashioned. There, I think that's thick enough. I'm going to serve the soup in this tureen and garnish it with some chopped parsley. There'll be some sippets to hand round too. And there we are. Cucumber soup. Perfect for a summer luncheon or a light way to start a dinner.