Historic German, Root Vegetable Soup

In this episode we're going to be making a wonderful root soup out of a translated 18th century German cookbook. Thanks for joining us today. The recipe that this comes from is actually from an 18th century German cookbook. The folks down at Old Salem, which is in Winston Salem, North Carolina, they're working on translating these for this sort of setting, for living history, and they've given us a sort of pre-published version of this book. So that's what we're working from on this one. This one is a root soup. Sounds really good. Let's get started. So let's talk about ingredients. This recipe calls for roots because it's a root soup, and there's something a little different here. Celery root is what it calls for. Celery root, maybe celeriac, is what we would use. I was unable to get some celeriac, so we're using what we've got here today. Also carrots, and that's easy enough. And parsley root, which is not something you typically see, but that's closely related to parsnip, so that's what we've got here. We've got parsnip, we've got carrot, and our other root that we're going to sub in here is a turnip. And the recipe calls for cutting these down into little slivers. It actually talks about cutting them into match-like length and size, a thick match. Our vegetables are all cut up here into their little pieces. Now it's time to sauté this in a little bit of butter. It calls for sautéing these, but not totally. So it says something like not until golden. I think we don't want to get these too soft in this state. We want these to still hold together in the soup. If this isn't, you know, pureed vegetable soup or pureed root soup, we want to still have some pieces in there. So our vegetables are cooked in our butter. It's time to get this starting to turn into a soup here. I'm going to change cooking utensils here so that we can make it into a soup. So let's get these vegetables into the pan here. Not going to take very long. We don't want that to overheat. There we go. Now in goes our beef broth. I've got, I don't know, it doesn't say how much, but as much as you need for your soup, obviously. Now it calls for, let's see, a little bit of salt. And although depending on your broth, it might have some in it. I've got a little bit of pepper. I'm going to go ahead and toss that in. And it actually calls for a little bit of flour in this to help thicken it up. I'm not going to add a lot because I'm not sure where it's going to go. And there's a thickener at the very end of this. As soon as this is basically done turning into our soup, we're actually going to thicken up with another ingredient. Well, our soup has been on. The vegetables or the roots are nice and soft, but they haven't broken down completely, which is what we're looking for here. The last part of this recipe is to actually get a little bit of a thickener in here with egg yolk. And they want us to basically temper some eggs here and then put them in as a thickener. So let me temper these egg yolks before I toss them in. We don't want to cook them, so we need to warm them up. So now we're going to go ahead and put these in. Okay, so this is ready to be served up now while it's still warm on top of a couple of sippets of bread. Here's our soup again. Smells wonderful. Has these wonderful savory smells to it. And, you know, it even has a real interesting look to it with the different color roots that are in here. We'll find out just what it tastes like. Really good. Really very good. You know, I was worried that it was going to be, say, you know, like a bland soup, but not at all. And almost a meaty flavor to it. This is a great mix of roots here. The carrots, parsnip, and the turnip. Many times I don't really care for turnip or parsnips that much, but this blended really well. So I'm loving the flavor of this particular soup. So really good. Excellent flavors. Wonderful recipe right out of this 18th century German cookbook. A wonderful take on a, hey, it's a root soup. It is really, really good. I want to thank you for coming along with us. You know, we are trying these things out. We're testing these things out. I also want to encourage you to check out our website. All the things you've seen here today, whether it's the bowls, or the clothing I wear, or all the cooking equipment, all these things are available in our print catalog on our website. You can go down into the description section. You can go right to the website and check that out. Who knows what you'll find there. Lots of fun stuff. But I want to thank you for coming along today as we savor the flavors and the aromas of the 18th century.