Soup for the servants' table

About a month ago I decided that I needed to learn how to make more kinds of soup. Frequent recipes in my old German sources for groat or barley soups piqued my curiosity, so I looked up one from Henriette Davidis and Louise Holle's 1901 cookbook for "Soup from oat groats with potatoes." "Very nutritious," groats are the inner kernels of wheat or buckwheat (actually not related to wheat) with the hull removed; they may also be broken into pieces larger than for grits. Unfortunately, Dear Husband could find no groats at the grocery store, but fortunately the recipe authorized a swap for barley, and "dishes with barley" is also on my list of "things to learn how to cook." More difficult was trying to identify the kohlrabi, celery root, parsley root, fennel root and/or leeks over the phone to each other (they were poorly labeled at the store), so DH came home with one of each of the following mystery vegetables and some onion. Whereas today, Americans eat a lot of "common vegetables" like carrots, broccoli, and tomatoes, these mostly root vegetables were all usual in traditional German kitchens. Can you identify them? (Answers below.)  

Per the instructions, I soaked the pearled barley in some water while chopping the veggies. It didn't say how much, so I started with 2 cups and added more while it was cooking. There were also no suggested amounts for the vegetables, so I just cut up everything I had--even the beets, which weren't in the original recipe and made the broth pinkish orange. DH said he thought it made the soup look "interesting." (!) Because I wanted to make meat-less version soup, I skipped the "good fat" from smoked beef, ham broth, or bacon and just put the soaked grain on to boil for two hours with a large pat of butter and some chicken bouillon. Around 1900, most Germans still valued beef broth or bouillon, sold as "meat extract" (Fleischextrakt), for its supposed nutritional value. It was often recommended to sick people as easy to digest and a food to build up their strength. Unfortunately, that was a misconception developed by Justus von Liebig, a famous German scientist in the mid-1800s, and propagated by Davidis, the most famous German cookbook author from the mid-nineteenth into the twentieth century. As nutritional scientists were discovering around the time this cookbook was published, Fleischextrakt really only tasted good--there was nothing nutritionally redeeming about it.

The last sentence of the recipe I followed is particularly interesting: "If the soup is meant to be filling for the servants' table, then one can measure out 50g [~ 1/2 cup] of oat groats." This is almost twice the amount of groats/barley per person as the original recipe calls for (30g = 1/3 cup), probably because in bourgeois families, this soup was merely the first course of a midday meal that also included one or two meat courses. (Soup was meant to stimulate the appetite.) The servants, however, would have been eating this as their main dish, most likely with bread and beer. We ate ours with a very anachronistic salad of baby spinach, carrots, and celery. It's anachronistic because at the time, raw vegetables were still a curiosity in Germany and widely considered indigestible! Even uncooked fruit was regarded with suspicion, something to warn children away from eating. My how things have changed since then! Part of the fun of my dissertation project is watching the discoveries of vitamins and minerals creep onto the pages of medical textbooks and home health manuals. Authors start in the 1910s by referring to the "so-called vital-amines" and their supposed benefits, and by the 1930s they open such discussions with the confident assertion that, "Because vitamins are so important to a healthy diet, ...." 


I'm still really focused on the early part of my period (1890 or 1900 to 1930 or 1935), but maybe later I will try to recreate some of the dishes I found in ladies' magazines at the end of the period, when these came with black-and-white or false-color photographs of vegetable or meat dishes arranged "just-so." It's hard to get inspired to decorate serving platters when it's just the two of us eating, but perhaps for Easter or another get-together I will use the opportunity of feeding many people to try my hand at this once-important cooking and hostessing skill.

Answers: DH came home with kohlrabi, a beet, a celery root, a leek, an onion, and a turnip. I knew I liked kohlrabi, but the turnip and celery root are also good. The leek in particular I find tasty. It's a pity neither of us has really taken to beets, which seem to take forever to cook and soften, because they have such a gorgeous garnet color to them. I also like the purple on the turnip skin, although it's plain white on the inside.