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Cream of Cucumber Soup
2 large cucumbers, 8 onions, sprig parsley, handful spinach, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1 tablespoon cornstarch, 1 quart white stock, 1 cup milk, 2 cups cream, 2 yolks eggs, nutmeg, 1 teaspoon sugar, pepper and salt to taste, croutons.
Peel cucumbers and cut firm part into dice, about 3 tablespoons; boil gently in salted water until soft, drain and reserve for soup. Cut remainder cucumber into pieces, cut onions small. Make Crisco hot in stewpan, fry onions and cucumber 5 minutes, add parsley with stock, let it simmer 20 minutes. Mix cornstarch with milk, stir in soup until it boils, let boil 10 minutes. Well wash and drain spinach, pound it in mortar, turn it into cloth and squeeze lightly as possible. Pour as much of this liquor into soup as will make it a delicate green color. Pass soup through sieve, turn it back into stewpan. Mix cream and yolks of eggs in basin, pour boiling soup on to them, stirring at same time, return to pan; it must not boil again or it will curdle. Season to taste with nutmeg, pepper, and salt. Cut bread into dice, fry pale color in hot Crisco, drain and toss them in sugar, sprinkle little red pepper over and place in oven 2 minutes. Warm dice of cucumber, put them in tureen with croutons and pour hot soup over and serve.
Beef, a la Mode 3 pounds lean beef, larding bacon, 1 quart stock, 1 glass claret, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 4 tablespoons flour, 2 carrots, 1 chopped onion, 10 button onions, sprig parsley, piece thyme, 1 bay leaf, juice half lemon, 2 cloves, salt and pepper to taste.
Trim, bone, and lard meat, place it in basin with wine, lemon juice, chopped onion, cloves, salt, pepper parsley, thyme, bay leaf, and let it stand 2 hours, basting frequently. Melt Crisco in stewpan, drain beef, and fry it brown, and at same time lightly fry button onions. Remove both from stewpan, put in flour, and fry until it acquires a nut-brown color; add stock and wine marinade in which meat was soaked, and stir until boiling. Replace meat and onions, season to taste, add carrots thinly sliced, cook gently for 3 hours, stirring and skimming occasionally. When done place on hot dish, strain sauce over, and garnish with groups of onions and carrots.
Two recipes ran together on this page: a cream of cucumber soup and, following it, Beef à la Mode. The notes below cover both, with the soup first.
- The hingeOnce the cream and yolks go in, the soup must not return to a boil. Bring it back only to about 175F, stirring, until it thickens slightly; above roughly 185F the yolks scramble and the soup breaks.
- CriscoThe book was written to promote it, and any neutral fat works: 2 tablespoons vegetable oil or butter for the soup, 3 for the beef. Butter browns better under the beef but will scorch at the higher heat used for the flour.
- Eight onionsAn unqualified quantity, and eight full-sized onions would swamp two cucumbers. It most likely means small onions; the later "10 button onions" in the beef recipe shows the book distinguished sizes when it cared to.
- White stockA light unbrowned stock from veal or chicken bones. Unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute — season at the end.
- Spinach liquorThis is the old "spinach green" colouring: raw leaves pounded and wrung out through cloth to give chlorophyll without flavour. A blender and a fine sieve do the same job. Add it after the soup is off a hard boil, as prolonged heat turns the green olive-drab.
- The croutonsFried in fat, tossed in sugar, dusted with red pepper, then two minutes in a hot oven to set the glaze; the book gives no temperature. They are meant to be sweet-hot against the cucumber, not plain toast; make them last so they stay crisp.
- Larding the beefLarding bacon means strips of fatback threaded through lean beef with a larding needle. Modern equivalent: use a well-marbled chuck or bottom round and lay bacon or fatback over the top, or skip it and accept a leaner result.
- Beef timingThree hours at a bare simmer, covered, or 300F in the oven if you prefer steadier heat. The meat should yield to a fork; the flour-thickened sauce needs skimming as the fat rises.
- YieldThe soup, with a quart of stock plus milk and cream, serves 6 to 8 as a first course. Three pounds of beef serves 6.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in the mid-1910s to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening the company had introduced in 1911 — which is why a vegetable fat appears where an earlier English cookbook would have said butter or beef dripping, in the frying, the roux and even the croutons. The soup itself is straight out of the nineteenth-century Anglo-French repertoire: a vegetable purée bound with cornstarch, finished with a liaison of cream and egg yolks, and tinted with wrung-out spinach juice, a colouring common in professional kitchens of the period. Beef à la mode, from the French bœuf à la mode, is the larded, marinated, long-braised pot roast; the claret marinade and the button onions and carrots served in groups around the dish are both marks of the classical treatment.