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Peanut Puree
1 cup peanut butter, 1 quart milk, 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1 teaspoon onion juice, 1 tablespoon cornstarch, 1 bay leaf, 1 blade mace, pepper and salt to taste. Put milk, Crisco, peanut butter, onion juice, pepper, bay leaf and blade mace in double boiler; stir and cook until hot. Moisten cornstarch in little cold milk and add it to hot milk; stir until smooth and thick; strain through sieve. Add salt and serve at once with croutons.
This is a soup, not a spread: a "puree" in period menus means a smooth thick soup, and this one is essentially peanut butter thinned with milk and lightly bound with cornstarch. It comes together in about twenty minutes and lives or dies on gentle heat.
- Don't let it boilPeanut butter and milk both scorch readily, and hard boiling risks splitting the peanut oil out onto the surface. The double boiler in the original is not optional caution; keep the water below a full boil and stir until the mixture is steaming and smooth.
- CriscoThis book was published to promote Crisco, so the shortening appears in nearly every recipe whether it earns its place or not. A tablespoon of butter or a neutral oil does the same job here, and butter tastes better.
- Peanut butter has changedCommercial peanut butter of the period was typically unsweetened and unstabilized, and often coarser than what we buy now. Many modern supermarket brands carry added sugar and hydrogenated oil, which can make the soup cloying. Use a natural grind whose only ingredients are peanuts and salt.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze the grated flesh in a cloth. A teaspoon is what you want, not the whole onion; it is meant to be a background note.
- Blade maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold in whole "blades" or ground. A blade is a piece an inch or so long. If you only have ground, use a scant pinch, and add it at the end since it will pass straight through the sieve.
- The cornstarch is light on purposeOne tablespoon to a quart gives body, not a pudding. Slake it in a few tablespoons of cold milk before it goes in, and give it two or three minutes of gentle cooking afterward to lose the raw starch taste.
- StrainingPush it through a fine sieve rather than pouring it through. The peanut solids and any cornstarch lumps need pressure to go, and skipping this step leaves the soup grainy. The bay leaf and mace are caught here.
- Yield and servingA quart of milk plus the additions gives roughly five cups, so four modest bowls or five small cups. It thickens and skins over as it stands, which is why the original says serve at once; hold it over warm water and stir if you must wait.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to find uses for Crisco, which had gone on sale in 1911; the book's job was to put a can of shortening into every part of the American dinner, including soups where it does little. Peanut soup itself is older than the cookbook and older than commercial peanut butter, and is generally traced to the cooking of the American South, where peanuts were an established field and kitchen crop and ground-nut soups were being served well before 1900. What is distinctly modern about this version is the jar of peanut butter, which had become a widely sold grocery item in the two decades before the book appeared and turned a laborious pounding job into a cup measured out of a tin. The bay leaf, mace and onion juice are the standard white-soup seasoning of the period, applied here to a new convenience ingredient.