Puree Soup
This soup is a puree of carrots and easy to prepare. Prepare six fine carrots, a large onion, cut them in fine slices, put a lump of butter the size of an egg in a small pan, then add the minced vegetable. Shake this over the fire until the vegetables are colored well but not brown. Add three pints of water and season. When the vegetables are cooked press them through a sieve, then return them to the same pan and add hot water or stock to give the desired consistency. Cut a number of small squares of bread at least half an inch thick, melt a tablespoonful of butter in a frying pan, put the pieces of bread in the butter when hot, and shake over the fire until brown. Pour the soup over the scuares of bread and serve. If a very rich soup is desired use rich stock.
A plain carrot pur e once the archaic measures are translated. The whole character of it depends on sweating the vegetables in butter without letting them take colour.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. The second, smaller quantity for the croutons is given plainly as a tablespoon.
- Three pintsSix cups by American measure. If you are working from a British edition, an imperial pint is 20 fl oz and three of them come to 7 1/2 cups.
- Six fine carrots"Fine" here means good specimens rather than finely cut. Reckon on about 1 1/4 lb trimmed and peeled.
- Coloured well but not brownThis is the hinge. Sweat the carrot and onion over medium heat, 10 to 15 minutes, until they glisten and turn deep orange and sweet. Browning the butter gives the finished pur e a scorched edge that no amount of stock will cover.
- Shake over the firePeriod shorthand for keeping a shallow pan moving over direct heat so nothing sticks. A wide saucepan and an occasional stir do the same work.
- Pressing through a sieveA blender or stick blender gets there in seconds, though a pass through a fine sieve afterwards is what gives the velvety texture the original was after.
- SeasonThe recipe leaves this entirely open. Salt, pepper, and a pinch of sugar if the carrots are dull; the soup is bland without a firm hand on the salt.
- CroutonsHalf-inch cubes fried in a single tablespoon of butter will drink it up at once. Add a little more butter or oil, or toast them in a 400F oven, and put them in the bowls so they stay crisp under the soup rather than sitting in it.
- YieldFour generous bowls, or six as a first course.
Puree soups belong to the French classical scheme that American and British household cookbooks were busily domesticating: a vegetable softened in butter, moistened, cooked, sieved, then thinned back to the consistency you want. In the professional kitchen a carrot version of this was known as Crecy, after a French town, though the name is traditionally linked to more than one Crecy and the carrot association is itself traditional rather than documented; household books like this one generally dropped the classical name and simply described the vegetable. The technique made sense in a period before mechanical blenders, when the sieve or tammy cloth was the only route to a smooth soup, and it also made sense economically: six carrots, an onion, water, and butter produce a full tureen, with the note about rich stock left as an option for households that had stock to spare. Fried bread served with soup is older than either.