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POTATO SOUP (another way) (Wash and peel a dozen large)
Wash and peel a dozen large potatoes, and put them into a stewpan with two quarts of the liquor in which meat has been boiled, one onion, and one carrot. Let all boil gently together for an hour, or until the potatoes are quite soft, then rub the whole through a fine sieve, and put the soup back into the stewpan. Mix three table-spoonfuls of flour to a smooth paste with half a pint of cold water. Mix a little of the boiling liquid with this, and afterwards turn the whole into the soup, and stir until the flour unites with the potatoes. Add pepper and salt if required, boil a few minutes longer, and serve very hot. Half a pint of milk or cream can be added or not. Send fried crusts to table on a separate dish. Time to boil the soup with the flour, about a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 3d. per quart. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
A thrifty Victorian soup built on the water left from boiling a joint of meat. Two things decide whether it works: how salty that liquor is, and how you purée the potatoes.
- Taste the liquor firstWater from boiled salt beef, ham or bacon can be intensely salty, and reducing it for an hour concentrates it further. Taste before you start and dilute with plain water or unsalted stock if needed; the recipe's "pepper and salt if required" assumes you have checked.
- Do not blend itThe instruction to rub the soup through a fine sieve is not fussiness. A food processor or stick blender ruptures potato starch and turns the soup into glue. Use a food mill, a ricer or the sieve as written.
- QuantitiesA dozen large potatoes is on the order of 4-6 lb depending on size, and two quarts of liquor is a tight fit for that much potato. Expect a thick puree and be ready to loosen it with more stock or water.
- Imperial measuresHalf a pint in a British book of this date is an imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz (about 284 ml), not 8. Three table-spoonfuls of flour may be superfluous given the starch already in the pot; add it only if the soup is thinner than you want.
- StewpanA broad, heavy pan with straight sides and a lid, near enough a modern Dutch oven or a wide saucepan. Nothing about the recipe requires the antique vessel.
- The milk or creamAdd it at the end and bring the soup back only to a bare simmer. A hard boil after the dairy goes in risks splitting it.
- Fried crustsBread crusts fried in dripping or butter, served separately so they stay crisp. Croutons in every sense; keep them off the surface until the soup is in the bowl.
- YieldEight to ten persons, as the book says, or five or six if served as a main with bread.
Cassell's is a Victorian household dictionary written for kitchens where nothing was thrown away, and this recipe exists chiefly to use up pot liquor — the water a joint had been boiled in, which was regarded as too good to pour away and too salty to drink on its own. The costing of 3d. a quart is the point of the entry as much as the method: potatoes were among the cheapest bulk starches available to an urban British household, and a soup that fed ten for under a shilling was a practical answer to feeding a large family or a staff. The technique of passing vegetables through a hair sieve to make a puree soup was standard before mechanical mouli graters and blenders reached domestic kitchens, and the "another way" in the title marks it as one of several potato soups the book offers.