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Potato Soup
1 quart white second stock or water, 1/2 pint milk, 1 pound potatoes, 1 onion, 1 stalk celery, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1 tablespoon fine sago or crushed tapioca, salt and pepper to taste.
Slice potatoes, onion, and celery. Make Crisco hot in stewpan, add vegetables, fry and cook until Crisco is absorbed, stirring frequently to prevent them browning. Add stock, and simmer until vegetables are tender (about 1 hour). Rub through fine sieve; return to saucepan, add milk, and bring to boil. Sprinkle in sago, cook until transparent, add seasoning to taste, and serve.
A plain sweated-vegetable purée thickened with sago rather than flour. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the ingredients and one of the timings need translating.
- White second stockA light stock made by reboiling bones and trimmings already used once — thin, pale, barely gelatinous. A mild chicken stock cut with water, or plain water as the recipe permits, gives the same effect. Avoid a dark or heavily reduced stock; it will overwhelm the potato.
- MeasuresThis is an American book, so 1 quart is 4 cups and 1/2 pint is 1 cup. A pound of potatoes is two medium russets or three medium Yukon Golds.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote Crisco, then a new all-vegetable shortening. Any neutral fat works; 2 tablespoons of butter gives a better soup, though it browns faster and needs closer watching.
- The hinge: no colour"Cook until Crisco is absorbed" means sweating the vegetables gently over low heat until they go limp and translucent. Any browning turns this from a white soup into something nuttier and greyer — the recipe's own instruction to stir frequently is there to prevent exactly that, so keep the heat under a bare sizzle.
- Sago and tapiocaFine sago is palm-starch pearl, now sold mainly in South and Southeast Asian groceries; crushed small-pearl tapioca is the direct substitute the recipe already offers. Sprinkle it in off a spoon while stirring or it clumps. "Cook until transparent" takes about 10 to 15 minutes at a bare simmer, not the minute or two the wording suggests.
- SievingA food mill or a fine sieve and a wooden spoon give the intended silky texture. A blender will work but overworks potato starch into gluey soup — pulse briefly, or use the mill.
- An hour is longSliced potato, onion and celery in simmering stock are tender in 20 to 25 minutes. The recipe gives no reason for the full hour, and the longer cooking does no harm beyond a duller flavour.
- YieldAbout 5 cups, or four first-course servings. Thin with more milk if the sago has set it too stiff on standing.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, and its recipes call for Crisco throughout — the book exists to teach American cooks that a hydrogenated vegetable fat could stand in for butter and lard, soup included. The soup itself is straightforward Anglo-French kitchen practice: sweat the vegetables in fat, moisten with a light second stock, pass through a sieve, finish with milk. What dates it most is the sago: pearl starches like sago and tapioca were a staple of the invalid-cookery and light-soup repertoire, valued because they thickened without clouding and were thought easy to digest.