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Celery White Soup
Boil a small cup of rice in three pints of milk until it will pass through a sieve. Grate the white parts of two heads of celery on a coarse grater; add this to the rice-milk after it has been strained, put into it one quart of strong white stock, either of veal or chicken, let it boil until the celery is perfectly tender, season with salt, cayenne pepper and serve. If cream is obtainable, substitute one pint of it for the same quantity of milk. It is a perfect success.-Miss Owen.
A rice-thickened white soup of the sort that filled the first course of Victorian and Edwardian dinners, before roux and cornflour took over. Nothing here is difficult, but the milk needs watching from start to finish.
- The hinge: milk over low heatThree pints of milk simmering long enough to collapse a cup of rice will scorch on the bottom of a thin pan and taint the whole batch. Use a heavy pan on the lowest workable heat, stir often, and allow 40-50 minutes; a double boiler is slower but safer.
- "Until it will pass through a sieve"This is the period's way of saying the rice should be soft enough to push through a fine sieve with a wooden spoon. A blender or stick blender does the same job in seconds, though a sieve afterwards still catches any grit from the celery.
- QuantitiesThree pints is 6 cups of milk on US measure, or about 7.5 cups if imperial pints are intended; one quart of stock is 4 cups. A "small cup" of rice is perhaps 2/3 cup uncooked. Use a plain long-grain or short-grain white rice, not parboiled or basmati.
- Strong white stockVeal or chicken stock, unroasted so it stays pale, and reduced enough to have body. A good unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute; season only at the end, since reduction concentrates whatever salt is already in it.
- Two heads of celeryTake the pale inner ribs and heart of one large supermarket bunch, about 10-12 oz trimmed. The green outer ribs will turn the soup a dull khaki, and are stronger in flavour than the white parts the recipe calls for.
- Grating, and how long to cook itGrated celery is tender in 10-15 minutes of gentle simmering, not the open-ended boil the text implies. Longer cooking flattens the flavour to something closer to boiled cabbage.
- CayenneA pinch, not a teaspoon. In this style of soup cayenne is there to lift the dairy, and it should not be identifiable as heat.
- YieldAbout 2 1/2 quarts, which is 8-10 servings as a first course. It thickens noticeably on standing; loosen with a little extra milk or stock when reheating, and do not let it boil once cream is in.
White soups—pale, thickened with rice, almonds or breadcrumbs and finished with cream—were a fixture of English and American dinner service from the eighteenth century onward, and celery was among the flavourings used for them. Celery was then a comparatively expensive vegetable, sold with the pale hearts intact and often served raw in tall cut-glass vases as a dish in its own right, so a soup calling for the white parts of two heads was making a modest show of means. The signed attribution to "Miss Owen" is typical of compilations like this one, which were assembled largely from contributed and clipped recipes; the closing flourish, "It is a perfect success," reads as a testimonial, though whose voice it is cannot be established from the text.