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Cream of Lettuce Soup
3 cups white stock, 2 heads lettuce, 2 tablespoons cooked rice, 1/2 cup cream, 1/4 tablespoon onion, finely chopped, 1 tablespoon Crisco, yolk 1 egg, nutmeg, salt and pepper to taste. Remove outer leaves from lettuce and shred it. Cook onion 5 minutes in Crisco, add lettuce, rice, and stock. Add cream, yolk egg slightly beaten, nutmeg, salt, and pepper to taste.
A thin, quickly made soup from one of the Crisco promotional cookbooks. The written method stops short of telling you to cook the lettuce or to be careful with the yolk, which are the two things that decide whether it works.
- The hinge: the yolkBeat the yolk with the cream, then temper it with a ladle of the hot soup before it goes into the pan, and keep the pot below a simmer afterward. Once it boils the yolk scrambles and the soup turns grainy.
- Cook the lettuce and stockThe original gives no time. Simmer the lettuce, rice and stock together about 15 minutes, until the leaves collapse entirely, before the cream and yolk go in.
- "Cream of" means sievedSieving -- many period cream soups of this type were pressed through a sieve or puréed after simmering, which gives a smoother body than this recipe's method produces on its own. The original does not call for it. A stick blender does it in seconds; strain afterward if you want it very fine.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock, made from bones and vegetables with no roasting or coloring. A mild unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute; a dark brown stock will muddy both color and flavor.
- CriscoShortening was the point of the book rather than of the soup. A tablespoon of butter does the same job of sweating the onion and tastes better here.
- 1/4 tablespoon onionAn odd fraction that works out to about 3/4 teaspoon of minced onion. It is a background note, not a flavor base.
- LettuceTwo heads of the loose romaine or butterhead sort, not two heads of iceberg, which contributes water and almost no flavor. The original simply says to remove the outer leaves; if yours are sound, wash and use them.
- NutmegFreshly grated, and very little — a few scrapes for the whole pot. It is there to lift the cream, not to be identified.
- YieldThree cups of stock plus a half cup of cream gives four small first-course servings. Season at the end, after the stock has reduced.
Lettuce soup belongs to a long line of European kitchen-garden soups that used up bolted or outer leaves too coarse for salad, thickened with bread or rice and, in the French manner, finished with cream and egg yolk. The version here comes from a cookbook written to demonstrate Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911; such books were commonly given away or sold cheaply, and their recipes call for the product in places where an earlier cook would simply have used butter. The egg-yolk-and-cream finish is called a liaison.