Large houses like Downton relied upon their kitchen gardens to supply most of their fruit and vegetable requirements. With enough money, almost anything could be produced, and in the Victorian era, the rich prided themselves on eating out-of-season produce, forced or retarded through skillful garden management. By the twentieth century, as land rents fell and many aristocrats struggled to maintain their estates, the acres of greenhouses were increasingly left to rot, and the boilers that had once heated the hothouses were abandoned. Some were turned into commercial market gardens, while others simply became less ambitious. But as any gardener knows, vegetable gardens left to their own devices produce a glut of produce, and skilled cooks need recipes to deal with that. The original recipe for this soup appeared in Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families, one of the best-sellers of the nineteenth century and remaining in print for over sixty years. Cooks who, like Mrs. Patmore, learned their art in the Victorian period would have known it well.