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Cream of Potato Soup
11/½ Cupfuls Mashed Pota- Combine the potato (which may be left toes 4 Cupfuls Milk 1 Small Onion 2 Tablespoonfuls Snowdrift 2 Tablespoonfuls Flour 1½ Teaspoonfuls Salt ⅛ Teaspoonful Pepper over) with the milk and the onion, and cook it in a double boiler for twenty minutes. Then remove the onion, add the seasonings and thicken the soup with the Snowdrift and flour creamed together.
A plain white soup built on leftover mashed potato, thickened at the end with a cooked-fat-and-flour paste rather than a roux made at the start. It comes together in about half an hour.
- SnowdriftA branded cottonseed-oil shortening from the Southern Cotton Oil Company, sold in the early decades of the twentieth century; the brand's presence in every recipe is why this book exists. Use an equal amount of butter or any neutral solid shortening; butter will give a fuller flavour than the original intended.
- The quantitiesRead as 1½ cups mashed potato, 4 cups milk, 1 small onion, 2 tablespoons shortening, 2 tablespoons flour, 1½ teaspoons salt and ⅛ teaspoon pepper. The salt figure assumes unsalted leftover potato; taste before adding it all.
- Double boilerThe gentle heat is there to keep milk from scorching or catching on a thin pan bottom. A heavy saucepan over low heat works if you stir often, but the double boiler is genuinely more forgiving over twenty minutes.
- The onionIt goes in whole and is fished out, so it flavours rather than thickens. Halve it if you want more onion character in twenty minutes, and remember to remove both halves.
- Thickening at the endCream the fat and flour to a smooth paste, then whisk it into the hot soup in small pieces and cook a further five minutes at least. Raw flour added off the boil leaves a pasty taste, which is the main failure point here.
- TextureLeftover mashed potato is often lumpy or already buttered. Pass the finished soup through a sieve or give it a brief pass with a stick blender for a smooth cream; do not overwork it or the starch turns gluey.
- YieldAbout five and a half cups, or four modest first-course servings. It thickens noticeably as it stands and will need thinning with more milk on reheating.
Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening from the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and books like this one were promotional cookbooks: every recipe that could take a fat took the brand's fat, including soups where butter had always been the default. Cream of potato soup itself long predates the product — it belongs to the family of thin, milk-based potato soups that spread through American and English household cookery in the nineteenth century, and is a close relative of the French potage parmentier, though this version is frankly a thrift recipe, its opening instruction being that the potato "may be left over." The habit of thickening at the end with kneaded butter and flour rather than starting with a roux is older still, generally traced to the beurre manié of French kitchen practice.