Name: How to Make Cucumber Soup — The Victorian Way
Uploaded: 2025-10-08T18:41:49.000Z
Duration: 7 min 42 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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 20 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.

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.

Now, I'll leave these for about an hour and then drain them.

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 the soup needs to be tammied.

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.

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.

Here I have cream with some arrowroot in it.

Arrowroot comes from the roots of different kinds of vegetables.

It 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.

The cucumbers will thicken the soup at all.

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 d boned pigeon.

I'm going to serve the soup in this terrine and garnish it with some chopped parsley.

There'll be some sippets to hand round too.

Perfect for a summer luncheon or a light way to start a dinner.