[Sca-cooks] OOP Food Content, Brown Windsor Soup, was Goon Show

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Huette von Ahrens:

>Well, you found a recipe for a French soup that
>uses the name "Windsor" in it, but that isn't any
>indication that what you found is The True
>Recipe.

True, but I never claimed it was. It was, however, the only lead I 
found when I looked for a recipe, in the days when the Internet was a 
tool for the US Department of Defense.

>I just plugged in "recipe windsor soup" on Yahoo
>and found quite a few recipes for BWS, including
>one from your favorite chef, Emeril Lagasse.

Tell me you're joking... ;-)

>1) Brown Windsor Soup
>
>1.4lt (2.5 pints) Beef stock
>350g (12oz) Stewing steak
>25g (1oz) Butter
>1 Small Onion
>1 Leek
>1 Small Carrot, diced
>1 tbsp Flour
>1 Bouquet Garni
>1 tbsp Parsley, chopped
>
>Finely chop the onion and green part of the leek,
>dice the carrot. Melt the butter in a large
>saucepan and cook the onion gently without
>colouring for 2-3 minutes. Add the leek and
>carrot, cover and allow to sweat for 5 minutes.
>Cut the beef into small cubes, and cook until
>browned on all sides. Mix the flour with a little
>stock to form a paste. Add this mixture and the
>remaining stock to the pan. Bring to the boil.
>Add the bouquet garni, cover and simmer very
>gently for 2 hours. Remove the bouquet garni.
>Either pass through a fine strainer or liquidise
>the soup. Serve garnished with parsley.

Pretty much the recipe I saw for Potage Windsor, except instead of a 
paste or slurry, it uses a brown roux. It might be Escoffier's 
Gallicized version, or Louis Diat's (both had a healthy respect for 
"classic" English cookery), but certain techniques are bred in the 
bone...

>5) Brown Windsor Soup
>
>This is one of those soups that for years has had
>a terrible reputation as the dreadful 'Brown
>soup' served up routinely in boarding houses
>before and after World War II. Indeed, my sister
>and I always used to refer to this kind of
>sub-standard fare as 'a bit of Brown Windsor'. It
>was always a joke food to us. However, properly
>made this is a great British soup and well worth
>trying.

This pretty much echoes my feeling that there are more bad cooks than 
there are bad dishes.

>Anyway, I hope you enjoy this soup.

Thank you! I had remembered it as being based on brown veal stock, 
rather than beef (or maybe that was some French cook's heterodox 
idea), but basically a pretty clear descendant of one of those Eliza 
Acton or Hannah Glasse "gravysoop" recipes. And you can see how, with 
all the wrong shortcuts taken, it might be pretty darned awful (akin 
to gluey, canned beef gravy) but there's no reason why it would have 
to be.

\Homer Simpson voice on\ "Mmmmm... Brown Windsor Soup made with 
oxtails..." \HSV off\

Adamantius