Potato Soup
Some To one gallon of water add six large potatoes chopped fine, one tea-cup rice, a lump of butter size of an egg, one table-spoon flour. Work butter and flour together, and add one tea-cup sweet cream just before taking from the fire. Boil one hour. - Miss Lida Canby.
A plain milk-free potato and rice soup thickened at the end with butter, flour and cream. The proportions are generous; a gallon of water makes a great deal of soup.
- Scale it downOne gallon of water with six potatoes and a cup of rice yields roughly 12 to 16 servings. Halving or quartering the recipe is sensible for a household of four.
- Butter the size of an eggThat is about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Worked with the tablespoon of flour it makes a small beurre manié rather than a cooked roux.
- Add the thickening properlyDrop the butter-flour paste into the simmering soup in small pieces and whisk, then let it cook two or three minutes so the flour loses its raw taste before the cream goes in.
- Sweet creamMeans fresh, unsoured cream, not sweetened. Any heavy or whipping cream works. The recipe adds it just before taking the pot from the fire; keeping it off a hard boil helps prevent separation.
- The hour of boilingA full hour at a rolling boil will break the potatoes down entirely and turn the rice to paste. A gentle simmer for 30 to 40 minutes gives cooked rice and potatoes soft enough to crush against the side of the pot.
- Rice choiceA teacup is usually reckoned at somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of a modern cup. Long-grain rice holds its shape; short-grain or arborio will thicken the soup further and may need extra liquid.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is listed. A gallon of water needs salting in stages, and the soup is much improved by white pepper and a bay leaf or an onion cooked with the potatoes.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (which grew out of a compilation first published in Marysville, Ohio, in 1876, and was reprinted in many enlarged editions, including Minneapolis printings from 1877) gathered contributions from named women across the Midwest, and Miss Lida Canby's soup is typical of what such a book preserved: cheap, filling, made from what was in the cellar in late winter. Potatoes and rice both stretched a pot of water into a meal, and the finish of butter, flour and cream is a common nineteenth-century way of giving body and richness to a soup made without meat stock. Recipes of this kind often assumed the cook knew the seasoning, the pot and the fire, so the written instruction covers only what was particular to this version.