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Spring Soup
1 large lettuce, 12 spring onions, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1 pint milk, 1 pint stock or water, 1 tablespoon cornstarch, parsley, salt, nutmeg, croutons of bread and sugar.
Wash lettuce and onions, shred lettuce and slice onions thinly. Melt Crisco in saucepan, and fry lettuce and onions for about 5 minutes; add stock and part of milk, and let simmer gently for 10 minutes. Mix cornstarch with remainder of milk, pour into soup and stir until it boils, simmer for another 10 minutes; season to taste with pepper, salt, sugar, and little nutmeg. Cut some crust of bread into thin strips and dry quite crisp in oven; put them into tureen with parsley picked small, and pour soup over. Watercress, endive, or sorrel may be used either along with, or in place of, the lettuce for a change.
A simple sweated-greens velouté from one of Procter & Gamble's Crisco promotional cookbooks. The whole dish stands or falls on how gently the lettuce is cooked.
- Don't brown the greensThe five minutes in fat should sweat the lettuce and onions until limp and still green, not colour them. Browned lettuce turns the finished soup grey-khaki and slightly bitter; keep the heat low and cover the pan.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote Crisco, then a new all-vegetable shortening. Any neutral oil works, but 2 tablespoons of butter gives a better result here since nothing needs to be fried hot.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups in American usage, so this is 2 cups milk and 2 cups stock. "12 spring onions" is roughly one supermarket bunch of scallions, green tops included.
- The cornstarchOne tablespoon slaked in cold milk thickens 4 cups of liquid only lightly. Stir constantly as it comes to the boil, then keep it at a bare simmer — a hard boil after thickening can thin starch back out and will scorch milk on the pan bottom.
- CroutonsThe book says only "dry quite crisp in oven" and gives no temperature; a low oven works, dried until the strips snap rather than bend. Note that the recipe has them sitting in the tureen as the soup is poured over, so they will soften quickly.
- Sorrel and watercressSorrel is acidic enough to curdle milk. If you use it, stir it in during the last two or three minutes off the boil rather than sweating it at the start.
- SeasoningThe sugar and nutmeg are corrective, not flavouring — a pinch each, enough to lift the lettuce. Note that the ingredient list omits pepper although the method calls for it.
- YieldAbout 4 cups of finished soup, serving four as a first course.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which had gone on sale in 1911; the recipes are built around the shortening, which explains why a delicate milk soup is fried in vegetable fat rather than butter. The dish itself belongs to a long European tradition of cooking lettuce rather than dressing it — French kitchens braised it, and English and American household books turned coarse or bolted leaves into soup. The alternates offered at the end — watercress, endive, sorrel — are all cool-weather greens that arrive at the same moment in the kitchen garden, which is the real logic of the recipe: it is a formula for whatever leaf is abundant in spring.