Bean Soup
Soak the beans over night, then drain them, rinse, and put them on to cook in boiling water to cover, containing a fourth teaspoonful of baking soda. When the skins begin to loosen, drain them again and put them on to cook in the quart of boiling water designated, together with the seasonings, and vegetables. Cook until the beans are tender, adding water to replenish any that may be lost through evaporation. Then add the milk, sift the 1 Cupful Top Milk or Light mixture, if desired, bring to boiling-point Cream 11/2 Teaspoonfuls Salt ¼ Teaspoonful Baking Soda and thicken with the flour and Snowdrift creamed together. Add the top milk, let come to the boil and serve with croutons.
A plain white-bean soup finished with a shortening-and-flour thickening and a little cream. The printed method runs ahead of its ingredient list, so a few quantities have to be reasoned out before you start.
- What the quantities appear to beThe legible amounts are 1 quart boiling water, 1 cupful top milk or light cream, 1 1/2 teaspoonfuls salt and 1/4 teaspoonful baking soda. The weight of beans, the vegetables, and the amounts of flour and Snowdrift are not stated anywhere in the text; for a quart of water, 1 cup of dried navy or white beans, one onion, one carrot and a rib of celery, with 2 tablespoons each flour and fat, give the right proportions.
- SnowdriftA brand of cottonseed-oil shortening sold from the early twentieth century. Any solid vegetable shortening works; butter gives more flavour, though it carries water and milk solids that shortening does not.
- The baking sodaThe soda in the first cooking water softens the skins and speeds cooking in hard water. Keep it to the quarter teaspoon specified — more turns the beans mushy, greyish and slightly soapy, and destroys thiamine. Drain and rinse thoroughly before the second cooking, as the recipe directs.
- Top milkThe richer upper portion of unhomogenised bottled milk, fattier than the milk below it but not pure cream. Light cream or half-and-half is the usual modern substitute; whole milk gives a thinner soup.
- Sifting the soup"Sift the mixture" means pass it through a sieve, forcing the beans through and leaving skins behind. A food mill or a brief pass with an immersion blender does the same, though blending gives a smoother, slightly gluier body than the sieve does.
- Don't boil hard after the creamBean purée plus dairy scorches easily and the cream can break if held at a rolling boil. Bring it just to the boiling point over moderate heat, stirring.
- TimingSoaked beans cooked with soda are generally tender within about an hour. Salt goes in at the start of the second cooking here, along with the seasonings.
- YieldProbably in the region of 1 1/2 quarts once the milk is in, though with the bean quantity missing this is only an estimate. The recipe directs that it be served with croutons; cut them small and fry or toast them dry.
A New Snowdrift Cook Book is a manufacturer's cookbook, issued to promote Snowdrift, a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening from the American South's cotton-oil industry. Books of this kind circulated free or for a few cents and worked by putting the brand name into ordinary recipes, so a bean soup that any cook could make with butter or drippings is thickened here with a proprietary fat. The soup itself belongs to the older tradition of dried-legume pottage stretched with milk — a cheap, filling dish that reached American cookbooks by way of both New England bean cookery and German-American Bohnensuppe. The instruction to sieve the beans and finish with cream marks it as the genteel version: what a plain household ate chunky, a cookbook meant for the parlour table served smooth and pale, with croutons.