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Scotch Potato Soup (Bunch leeks or cups onion cups)
1 bunch leeks or 2 cups onion. 3 cups potato cubes. 1 head celery. 1 quart milk. 2 tablespoons flour. 1/2 tablespoon finely chopped parsley. 5 tablespoons butter.
Salt, pepper.
PROCESS: Cut leeks and celery in thin slices crosswise and sauté in two tablespoons butter eight minutes (without browning), stirring constantly. Turn milk into double boiler, add leeks and celery; cover and cook until vegetables are tender (about forty-five minutes). Parboil potato cubes in boiling salted water ten minutes. Melt remaining butter in a sauce-pan, add flour, stir to a smooth paste, remove from range and pour on slowly some of the milk until mixture is of the consistency to pour. Combine mixtures, add seasonings, and cook in double boiler until potatoes are tender. Turn into hot soup tureen and sprinkle with parsley.
A milk-based leek and potato soup built in a double boiler, which is the period's way of keeping dairy from catching and scorching. Nothing here is difficult, but the timings assume a coal range with uneven heat.
- The double boiler is the hingeMilk held over direct heat will scorch and skin over long before the leeks soften. If you use a heavy saucepan instead, keep the heat at a bare tremble and stir often; the original's method exists precisely to make that unnecessary.
- Forty-five minutes is longSliced leeks and celery in simmering milk are tender in 15 to 20 minutes over direct low heat. The three-quarters of an hour reflects the gentle, indirect temperature of a double boiler, where the liquid stays below a true simmer.
- "1 head celery"This means a whole bunch as sold today, not a single rib. Use the outer stalks and reserve the pale heart. Peel the coarse outer ribs if they are fibrous.
- A bunch of leeksThree or four medium leeks, white and pale green only, will give roughly the 2 cups the recipe offers as an alternative. Split them lengthwise and rinse well; grit sits between the layers.
- Sauté without browningTwo tablespoons of butter over medium-low, stirring the whole eight minutes. Any colour on the leeks will read as scorched against the white milk base and will tint the finished soup.
- The rouxThree tablespoons butter to two tablespoons flour is a loose, buttery paste rather than a stiff one. Taking the pan off the heat before adding milk is the old insurance against lumps; whisking hot milk in gradually does the same job.
- PotatoesA firm boiling potato holds its cube shape; a russet will fray and thicken the soup further. Ten minutes' parboiling plus the finish in the milk means roughly half-inch dice.
- YieldAbout six generous servings as a first course. Season more assertively than seems right while hot: milk soups taste flat and need salt and a good deal of white pepper.
Leek-and-potato soup thickened with milk belongs to the same broad family as the French potage parmentier, and in Scotland the leek was long the household allium of choice, appearing in cock-a-leekie and in the everyday broths that used whatever the kailyard produced. Calling it "Scotch" in an American cookbook of this period is less a claim of provenance than a marketing label; late Victorian and Edwardian menu-writers routinely attached national adjectives to plain dishes to give a weeknight soup some standing on the table. The double boiler that governs the method here was a fixture of turn-of-the-century American kitchens, sold as the answer to milk and eggs on an unregulated range. This is a first course meant to be got started early and left alone while the roast claimed the oven.