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Cream of Carrot Soup
2 cups chopped carrots. 1 small onion sliced. 2 sprays parsley. 1/4 cup washed rice. 2 cups water. 2 cups scalded milk. 1/2 cup hot cream. 1/4 cup butter. 2 tablespoons flour.
Salt, pepper.
PROCESS: Cook carrots in water until tender. Rub through sieve, reserving the liquor. Cook rice in milk in double boiler until soft. Sauté onion a delicate brown in butter, add flour and stir to a paste. Add carrot mixture to milk and pour slowly over flour paste, stirring constantly; heat to boiling point and add cream. Strain into hot soup tureen and sprinkle with finely chopped parsley.
A 1913 puree thickened twice over — once with rice cooked in milk, again with a butter-and-flour roux — which gives it a heavier body than most modern carrot soups. Nothing here is difficult, but the sequence matters.
- The hinge: pour the liquid onto the roux slowlyAdd the hot carrot-and-milk mixture to the flour paste a ladleful at a time, whisking hard, so the flour disperses before it sets. Dumping it in at once gives lumps that no amount of later straining will fully rescue.
- Rice in milk needs patienceA quarter cup of raw white rice in 2 cups of milk over a double boiler takes a good while, likely 40 minutes or more, before it is soft enough to go into the soup. 'Washed rice' here simply means rice rinsed before cooking, not a particular variety. Stir occasionally so a skin does not form.
- Scalded milkHeated to just below boiling, around 180F, when a rim of bubbles forms at the edge. It was originally done to kill souring organisms in unpasteurised milk; with modern milk it simply shortens the cooking time for the rice.
- The onion is for flavour, not textureSautéed "a delicate brown" means golden and sweet, not scorched — burnt onion will taint the whole pot. It goes out at the final straining, so slicing rather than mincing makes that step easier.
- Reserve the carrot liquor and use itThe recipe reserves the liquor and thereafter refers only to the 'carrot mixture,' which most likely means the sieved puree together with that liquor. Add it back with the sieved carrot to loosen the puree; without it the soup finishes closer to a sauce.
- Cream at the end, off the boilBring the soup to boiling point to cook out the flour, then add the hot cream and stop heating. Boiling after the cream goes in risks curdling in an already flour-thickened base.
- YieldAbout 5 cups, or four servings as a first course. Season at the very end — the rice and roux both mute salt, and the butter is already a quarter cup.
Cream soups of this kind were the backbone of the American middle-class dinner menu around 1900: a vegetable pureed, extended with milk, and bound with rice, flour or both. 52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was a menu book, one full dinner for every Sunday of the year, and its soups lean on roots and dairy because that is what a Northern household had on hand. The double thickening is characteristic of the period — cookbooks then prized a soup that coated the spoon. The final instruction to strain into a heated tureen is a reminder that soup still came to the table in one vessel and was ladled out there, which is also why the recipe bothers to keep the cream hot.