Rhubarb Soup

Typical of Victorian inventiveness, this soup is essentially a beef consommé given a boost by the sharpness of rhubarb. The rhubarb would have come, like most of the fruit and vegetables used at Audley End, from the kitchen garden. It would have been available to the kitchen as both forced (grown under a pot to exclude the light, making tender, pale stalks, ready early in the year) and unforced. Rhubarb works a little like lemon or tamarind (a flavour known to the Victorians, if seldom used