Spring Soup
3 bunches chopped watercress. 1 bunch young onions. 3 tablespoons butter. 2 tablespoons flour. 1/2 cup thin cream.
Yolk 1 egg slightly beaten.
Salt, pepper.
Parsley finely chopped.
PROCESS: Pick off the leaves of cress and chop fine. Cut onions in thin slices. Cook watercress and onions in butter five minutes (without browning), add flour and salt, stir until smooth, then pour milk on gradually, stirring constantly. Cook over hot water twenty minutes. Add beef extract, stir until dissolved; season with Worcestershire sauce and a few grains cayenne. Strain into hot soup tureen, add whipped cream and sprinkle with finely chopped parsley.
A typical 1913 cream soup, and a good example of a printed recipe whose ingredient list and method have drifted apart. Read both columns before you start and decide what you are actually making.
- The list and the method disagreeThe ingredients name a half cup of thin cream and an egg yolk; the method calls for milk, beef extract, Worcestershire and cayenne, and never uses the yolk. The milk quantity is missing altogether; on the period's usual thin-sauce ratio, 2 tablespoons of flour suits roughly 2 to 3 cups of milk. Hold the cream for the finish, and treat the yolk as optional enrichment whisked with the cream.
- Thin creamEarly twentieth-century "thin cream" is closest to today's light cream, somewhere around 18 to 20 percent fat; modern half-and-half is thinner than that. It is called for again at the end as "whipped cream," which a thin cream will not do -- use lightly whipped heavy cream for the garnish if you want the original effect.
- Beef extractBovril or Liebig's-style meat extract, a thick dark paste sold in jars. A teaspoon is plenty for this quantity; a beef bouillon cube dissolved in a spoonful of hot water is the nearest supermarket stand-in, though it is saltier, so hold back the salt until the end.
- Cook over hot waterA double boiler. Twenty minutes over simmering water cooks out the raw flour without scorching the milk. A heavy saucepan over low heat works if you stir, but the double boiler is the reason this soup does not catch.
- Watercress quantityThree bunches picked to leaves is a large amount of greenery, and it will cook down dramatically. Supermarket bunches are often small, so two large bags of watercress may be closer than three modern bunches.
- Do not brownThe instruction is explicit and it matters. Onion or cress that takes colour turns the finished soup grey-brown instead of green, and watercress goes bitter when it catches. Keep the heat gentle for the full five minutes.
- StrainingThe soup is strained, so the vegetables are flavouring only and the result is a smooth, thin cream soup rather than a purée. Blending instead of straining gives a thicker, more assertive modern version, but not the dish as written.
- YieldAbout 4 servings as a first course. Serve immediately — the colour dulls and the milk skins over on standing.
Watercress soup is a soup for early spring, and its place in the calendar is the point: cress was among the first green things available in quantity in early spring, grown in flowing water and sold in bunches by street vendors well into the twentieth century. The construction here — butter and flour cooked together, milk added gradually, the whole finished with cream and a whipped-cream garnish — is the standard American cream soup of the period, a formula general enough that it turns up in much the same terms across the cookbooks of the day. The beef extract is the era's signature shortcut: commercial meat extracts, sold from the 1860s onward, let a home cook put a savoury backbone into a soup without keeping stock on hand, and cookbooks of this generation reach for them constantly.