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PUMPKIN SOUP (another way)
Slice a pumpkin, and stew it in butter until tender, then reduce it to a puree. Add to this as much hot milk, flavoured with cinnamon or lemon, as may be required to thin it for a soup. Throw in a little salt; and when properly heated, have ready a couple of eggs whisked to froth, put them into the tureen, and pour the soup over. Serve immediately.
A short, loosely measured Victorian purée soup that depends entirely on two things: a dry, well-flavoured pumpkin and a gentle hand with the egg liaison at the end.
- The hinge: the eggsThe whisked eggs go into the empty tureen and the hot soup is poured over them, thickening and enriching without ever returning to the heat. If the soup is boiling when it hits them the eggs scramble into threads; take it off the heat, let it settle below a simmer, and pour steadily while stirring.
- Egg safetyThat liaison never reaches a reliably pasteurising temperature, since the tureen cools the soup as it goes in. Use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone very young, elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised.
- Choose the pumpkinLarge field pumpkins sold for carving are watery and bland. Use a dense culinary squash — sugar pumpkin, kabocha, crown prince or butternut — about 2 lb prepared weight, peeled and deseeded.
- Stewing in butterThis is a slow sweat, not a fry. Around 2 oz butter in a heavy pan over low heat with the lid on, 20-30 minutes, stirring so the flesh softens in its own moisture without colouring. A little colour is fine; browning muddies the flavour.
- How much milkThe original gives no quantity. For 2 lb of pumpkin, about 1 to 1.5 pints (roughly 2.5-3.75 cups) of hot milk gives a pouring soup; add it gradually and stop where you like the consistency.
- Flavouring the milkWarm the milk with a cinnamon stick or a strip of pared lemon zest and let it infuse off the heat for ten minutes, then strain. Ground cinnamon stirred in directly leaves grit and a dusty note.
- SeasoningSalt alone, as written, tastes thin to modern palates. White pepper and a scrape of nutmeg suit it, and a small pinch of sugar helps if the squash is bland.
- YieldAs scaled above, four to six servings as a first course. It does not reheat well once the eggs are in, so make the purée ahead and finish at the table.
Pumpkin soup thickened with a butter-stewed purée and finished with beaten egg belongs to a family of white potages that ran through French and English cookery well before Cassell's compilers set it down — the technique of pouring hot soup over eggs in the tureen rather than cooking them in the pan is the standard liaison, used equally for veal, almond and vegetable soups. The cinnamon and lemon flavouring points to the older tradition, still audible here, of treating pumpkin as something closer to a sweet than a savoury vegetable; pumpkins in Britain were long grown as fodder and cottage-garden bulk, and the surviving recipes suggest that cookery writers often reached for spice and sugar to make them interesting. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery ran variant methods for the same dish under headings like this one, giving the household cook a plainer or richer route depending on what the larder held.