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Pumpkin Soup
Take half or a quarter of a moderate-sized pumpkin, pare it, remove the seeds, and cut the flesh into thin slices. Put these into a stewpan, with as much water or milk as will cover them, and boil gently until they are reduced to pulp. Rub this through a fine sieve, mix with it a pinch of salt and a piece of butter the size of an egg, and stir it over the fire until it boils. Thin it with some boiling milk, which has been sweetened and flavoured with lemon-rind, cinnamon, or orange-flower water. It should be of the consistency of thick cream. Put toasted bread, cut into dice, at the bottom of the soup tureen. Moisten the bread-dice with a small quantity of the liquor, let them soak a little while, then pour the rest of the soup over them, and serve very hot. Or, whisk two fresh eggs thoroughly in the tureen, and pour the soup in over them at the last moment. The liquor ought to have ceased from boiling for a minute or two before it is poured over the eggs. Time, two hours. Probable cost, uncertain.
A sweet pumpkin soup in the French manner, thinned with flavoured milk rather than stock — closer to a dessert soup or a nursery supper dish than to the savoury purée the name now suggests. Read it that way before you start.
- How much pumpkinA "moderate-sized" field pumpkin of the period might run 8-12 lb, so a quarter to a half is a great deal. About 2 lb of prepared flesh gives four to six servings; use a dense culinary type such as sugar pumpkin, kabocha or butternut rather than a watery carving pumpkin.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. It is there for richness and gloss, not for frying.
- The two-hour timingThat covers paring, seeding, sieving and the whole assembly. Thin slices in barely enough liquid to cover collapse to pulp in 20-30 minutes; longer than that on milk risks catching and scorching at the base of the pan.
- Milk or waterIf you cook the pumpkin in milk, keep the heat very low and stir — milk scorches where water does not. Cooking in water and enriching with milk at the end is the safer route and tastes no less good.
- SievingA blender or food mill does in a minute what the fine sieve did in ten, but pass it through a sieve afterwards if you want the texture the recipe means by "thick cream." Pumpkin fibre is stubborn.
- The sweetening is left to youNo quantity is given. Start at 1-2 tablespoons of sugar per quart and taste; this should read as lightly sweet, not as a pudding. Orange-flower water is potent — a scant teaspoon in the finished pot is plenty. Lemon rind and cinnamon should be steeped in the hot milk and strained out.
- The bread diceToast them dry and hard. Soft bread turns to paste under hot soup; the point of the soaking step is that firm croûtons swell without dissolving.
- The egg finishEggs whisked in the tureen and flooded with near-boiling soup make a liaison, but they are not reliably cooked through and the soup must not be reheated afterwards or it will curdle. Use pasteurised eggs, or leave this variant out — the soup is complete without it.
This is the kind of plain continental soup that English cookery books of the period took from French domestic practice, where potage au potiron was often made sweet, milk-thickened and poured over dried bread — a use for the large autumn pumpkins that were commonly grown for stock feed as well as for the table. The bread at the bottom of the tureen is the older shape of soup itself: soupe originally meant the sop, the slice of bread the broth was poured onto, and the liquid took its name from the bread rather than the other way about. The sweetened, spiced, orange-flower-scented finish belongs to a period when the line between a soup and a milk pudding was drawn less firmly than it is now, and when orange-flower water was a familiar English store-cupboard flavouring. "Probable cost, uncertain" appears where the price of an ingredient could not be reckoned — for a garden pumpkin, presumably, though the book does not say so.