History Dish Mondays: Turtle Soup

Photo by Everett Bogue

Yesterday, I cooked up a batch of a popular 19th century summertime treat, Turtle Soup.  It went over surprisingly well with my friends!  But you'll have to wait to read more about it: I was testing my turtle recipe for an upcoming article in Edible Queens magazine.  The Summer 2010 issue will feature this dish and many more.

Retronovated Recipes: Soup Meagre

Soup Meagre is a great spring recipe from about 1723.  It's a sort of catch-all meal made of all types of early season vegetables: onions, peas, and leafy greens.  

The original recipe can be found in the American History Cookbook;  in the original, you add a hunk of stale bread and cream the soup together into something I can only imagine resembles baby food.  In my modernized version, I leave this final step out, and let the vegetables maintain their integrity in the broth.

I made this soup recently at my friend Mark's house: I had gathered some wild onions from a farmer's field and brought them over as a gift.  He pointed out some wild greens in his front yard, and we decided to make a batch of soup meagre.

The original recipe features sorrel, a leafy green that is ready in May when it's cultivated, and June if it's found wild.  It's flavor is tart and distinctly lemony.  When choosing greens for this soup, I recommend using a combination of mild and tart flavors.  I also enjoy making this soup heartier with the addition of a hard boiled egg for garnish.  This recipe can be made your own with the additions of any ingredients you have on hand: mushrooms, white beans, ham;  be creative.  We didn't have cloves, so we used cinnamon and red pepper flakes.  This recipe can also easily be made vegetarian by using a vegetable broth instead of chicken.  

The point is: feel free to diverge from this recipe in ingredients and proportions.  It's very hard to go wrong.

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Soup Meagre
Inspired by a recipe from a 1723 manuscript as it appears in The American History Cookbook by Mark H. Zanger.

3 bunches leafy greens, including any combination of spinach, parsley, kale, sorrel, lamb's quarter, or dandelion; washed well.

1 medium onion

2 cloves

1/2 stick salted butter

2 cups peas

3-6 cups Chicken stock

Salt and Pepper to taste

Hard boiled eggs for garnish

1. Melt butter in bottom of pot. Add onions and season with salt and pepper.  Cook until transparent.

2. Add chicken stock, cloves, and peas.  Bring to a boil.  Test peas for doneness (they want to be a little under done at this point). Taste and re-season broth, if necessary.

3. Add greens and cook five more minutes, or until greens are just wilted.

4.  Garnish with hard boiled eggs and serve.

Note: this soup is not good the next day; the greens tend to get slimy  So only make as much as you will eat in one meal.

History Dish Mondays: Featherballs

You are gonna love these balls.

This week, in my ongoing Jewish-American cooking project, Ilana and I are attempting Featherballs:

Featherballs are essentially matzo balls, but are unique in the fact that they are flavored with nutmeg or ginger. My friend and cohort Ilana pointed out that ordinarily in matzo ball soup, it's the broth that is the most flavorful, and the matzo balls added as filler. In this recipe, the flavor of the matzo balls are brought to the forefront. Additionally, these balls do have a light and fluffy texture--but we'll get to that in moment.

I journeyed to Brooklyn to meet with Ilana and her boyfriend Jed, for a lesson in Matzo balls. They filled me in on some matzo ball facts: That they were normally made with butter or margarine, so they anticipated this recipe to be much richer, and possibly heavier. Additionally,

most New York matzo balls are fist-size, like the ones you'll find at Katz's or the 4th Ave. Deli. These featherballs were to be rolled the size of walnuts. Their are also two types of matzo balls--the light "floaters" and the dense "sinkers." Neither are wrong, just a personal preference.

We whipped the eggs and the schmaltz until each were fluffy, then combined them and added the dry ingredients. We split the dough between two bowls, and flavored half with nutmeg, and half with ginger. The dry ingredients were added, and mixed by hand until just combined. Jed warned us that over mixing the ingredients would result in a matzo ball as hard as rock.

Jed also said that with most matzo ball recipe, you let the batter chill first, and then roll the balls. In the recipe, you roll first and then chill. We shrugged and followed the recipe.

While the matzo balls chilled in the fridge, Jed cooked some carrot slices in chicken broth. We used boxed broth, but one of the cool things about this recipe is it written for a home cooked soup: you would make you soup, skim the chicken fat off the top, add the fat to the matzo balls, and cook the balls in the soup. Jed also noted that the carrots are essential; they help to break up the saltiness of the broth and the matzo, and gives your palette a rest.

The featherballs are dropped into boiling chicken broth.

When the broth came to a rolling boil, we dropped the featherballs in and covered the pot. 18 minutes later they were done. Be careful not to cook them too long--they begin to fall apart in the water. Some may be a little underdone in the middle, which is fine. We turned off the burner and served us up a bowl of featherballs.

I have to admit, I have no basis of comparison, these being perhaps the second matzo balls I've had in my life. But I did think they were really good. Jed and Ilana have grown up on matzo. The three of us agreed the texture was great--Jed and Ilana said much less dense than an ordinary matzo ball. It was light, but also very hearty. After eating four, we were full.

We couldn'y taste the ginger in the featherballs, although they were still salty and good. The nutmeg taste was present, and they were deigned the favorites by Jed and Ilana. For me, it was hard. I associate the taste of nutmeg with dense cakes of the 1850s, and it was difficult to get out of the mindset. We speculate that mace (the spicy out shell of a nutmeg) might also make a good featherball.

The featherballs were really perfect. Ilana hit the nail on the head: "These are the best matzo balls I've ever had. I think we've really rediscovered something."

In the coming weeks, we plan on doing one more Jewish cooking day based on our Manischewitz cookbook. Ilana and Jef will handle savory dishes (pumpkin pancakes, tamales, asparagus wheel) and I'll attack sweets (boston pie, orient cake, farfelroons). I will keep you updated as to our progress.