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Potato Soup
Wash a dozen or more large potatoes (regents are to be preferred), in lukewarm water, and scrub them until quite clean with a soft brush. Drain them, and put them into a saucepan, barely cover them with cold water, and let them simmer gently until they are done enough. Pour off the water, and let them dry. Dissolve an ounce and a half of butter in a saucepan, and put in with it two moderate-sized onions finely minced, and a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley, and let the onions steam gently until tender. Peel the potatoes, and rub them through a colander until quite smooth. Put them into the pan with the onions, etc., and stir all well together. Add a bay-leaf to the mixture, then pour in as much boiling water as will make a thick batter, and afterwards add as much boiling milk as will make the soup of the consistency of thick cream. Let it boil, put in pepper and salt to taste, and also a little grated nutmeg, and serve with toasted sippets in the dish. The soup will be better if white stock be used instead of water. Time, one hour. Probable cost, 4d. per quart. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plain purée soup that depends almost entirely on the texture of the potato and the restraint of the seasoning. Two decisions matter: which potato, and how it is mashed.
- Never use a blenderRubbing the potatoes through a colander (a ricer or food mill does the same work faster) breaks the cells without shearing them. A food processor or stick blender turns cooked potato into glue, and no amount of milk will loosen it again.
- RegentsAn old English floury maincrop variety, long out of commerce. Substitute any dry, high-starch potato: russet, King Edward, Maris Piper. Waxy salad potatoes will not purée smoothly here.
- Cook them in their skinsThe instruction to barely cover with cold water and then dry the potatoes off is deliberate — skin-on cooking keeps them from waterlogging, and the brief drying drives off surface moisture so the purée is not thin from the start.
- QuantityA dozen or more large potatoes is several pounds of potato, which yields far more than four or five portions of soup. Either the potato count or the serving count is generous; for four people, something nearer 2 lb of potatoes with the stated 1½ oz butter and two onions is a workable reading.
- Sweat, do not brownThe onions steam gently in butter, covered, until translucent. Any colour on them shifts the soup away from the pale, creamy result the recipe is after.
- Milk goes in boilingBoth the water and the milk are added hot. Add the boiling milk gradually until it flows like thick cream; it will thicken again as it stands.
- Fish out the bay leafThe bay is added whole to the purée and never told to be removed. Take it out before serving, along with any stray skin.
- SippetsSmall squares or triangles of toasted bread, put into the tureen or plate rather than passed separately. Fried croutons are the modern equivalent.
- Cost and timeFourpence a quart reflects late-Victorian prices and marks this as an inexpensive soup. The stated hour is realistic if the potatoes are boiling while the onions sweat.
Potato soup of this kind belongs to the Victorian category of cheap soups. The note that white stock improves it suggests the water version suited households with no stockpot going and the stock version those who had one. The named variety, Regent, was among the widely grown British maincrop potatoes of the nineteenth century and is generally credited to the 1770s; like many named sorts of the period it has since dropped out of cultivation. The nutmeg and bay are conventional English seasoning for a white soup of the era, inherited from eighteenth-century practice, where grated nutmeg went into far more savoury dishes than it does now.