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Milk Soup
Peel two large potatoes and the white part only of one leek. If a leek cannot be had, a small onion may be used instead. Boil until soft in a quart of water, add a slice of butter and a little pepper and salt. Rub all through a colander with the back of a wooden spoon. Mix a pint of milk with the water in which the vegetables were boiled, add the pulp, and boil the soup again, stirring it to keep it from burning. Sprinkle in a table-spoonful of crushed tapioca, boil fifteen minutes longer, and serve at once. Vermicelli or any Italian paste may, if liked, be used instead of tapioca. The French stir in pounded cocoa-nut or almonds just before serving. All white soups should be warmed in a vessel placed in another of boiling water. Time, an hour to prepare. Sufficient, two quarts of milk for eight persons.
A thin potato-and-leek purée finished with milk and a starch thickener — essentially a plain potage bonne femme, written for a household that thickened soup with tapioca rather than cream. A few of the quantities need reconciling before you start.
- The yield does not match the ingredientsThe body of the recipe makes about three pints — two or three servings. The closing note ("two quarts of milk for eight persons") describes a batch scaled up roughly fourfold. Multiply everything by four for eight people: 8 potatoes, 4 leeks, 4 quarts water, 2 quarts milk.
- A slice of butterButter was cut from a block, and a "slice" is usually read as roughly a tablespoon (about 15 g), though the amount was left to the cook. Add more if you want a rounder soup; there is no cream here to do that work.
- Crushed tapiocaThis is broken tapioca, sold now as small pearl or granulated tapioca — not the large boba pearls and not instant tapioca pudding mix. A tablespoon in three pints of liquid gives a barely-there body; use two if you want the soup to coat a spoon. Fifteen minutes is right for granules, which should turn clear.
- The colander is the sieveThere were no blenders. Pressing the boiled vegetables through a colander with a wooden spoon gives a slightly coarse purée, which suits the soup. A food mill or a few pulses in a blender does the same; avoid over-blending potato, which turns gluey.
- Keep the waterThe point of the method is that the cooking liquid becomes the stock — do not drain it away. Boiling a quart down while the potatoes soften is expected, so top up with water if it reduces below about three cups.
- Milk scorchesOnce the milk goes in, hold the soup just under a simmer and stir. The closing instruction about a vessel set in boiling water is a bain-marie or double boiler, still the surest way to reheat a milk soup without catching it on the bottom.
- The French finishThe recipe has the pounded almonds or coconut stirred in "just before serving"; adding them at the very last moment keeps them from going grainy. Ground almonds also thicken slightly, so you may want less tapioca, or none, if you use them generously.
- SeasoningWhite pepper rather than black avoids dark specks in a pale soup, though the recipe specifies only "pepper". Taste at the end — potato and milk both flatten salt.
Milk soups sit in a long European tradition of meatless potages made without stock, valuable in a period when a household might have neither broth on hand nor money for meat, and useful on fast days and in the sickroom. This version is a straightforward potato-and-leek purée — the same combination behind French potage bonne femme and, chilled and enriched, behind vichyssoise — but thickened with tapioca rather than cream or egg yolks. Tapioca, the starch of the cassava root, reached British kitchens through colonial trade and became a common Victorian thickener for soups as well as puddings, cheap and neutral in flavour. It reads like a teaching example: one method, three interchangeable thickeners (tapioca, vermicelli, or the "French" pounded nuts), and a closing rule about the water bath offered as applying to white soups generally.