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WHITE SOUP (another way) (Take two quarts of good)
Take two quarts of good, nicely-flavoured white stock, entirely free from fat (see STOCK, WHITE, FOR WHITE SOUPS AND SAUCES); put it into a stewpan, and let it boil up. Mix four table-spoonfuls of cornflour to a smooth thin paste with a little cold milk. Stir this into the boiling stock, let it boil, then draw it back, and let it simmer gently, stirring all the time, for seven minutes. Season the soup with pepper and salt, stir into it a pint of boiling cream or milk, and serve very hot. Time, with the stock already made, about an hour. Probable cost, if made with cream, and with stock costing 1s. per quart, 4s. Sufficient for ten or twelve persons.
A thickened white stock soup of the plainest Victorian kind — the technique is sound, but two details in the wording will trip a modern cook.
- Cornflour is cornstarchBritish "cornflour" is the fine white starch sold as cornstarch in the United States, not finely milled corn. Four tablespoons to two quarts gives a lightly bodied soup rather than a thick one; use less if you want it barely thickened.
- Slake it cold, alwaysThe hinge of the recipe: the starch must be mixed to a lump-free slurry with cold milk before it meets the boiling stock. Tipped in dry it seizes into knots that no amount of stirring will disperse.
- "Draw it back" means off the heatThe instruction is to pull the pan to the cooler side of the range. On a modern hob, bring it to a boil, then reduce to the barest simmer for the seven minutes — long enough to cook out the raw starch taste.
- Don't boil the cream inThe pint of cream or milk is added already hot so the soup is not chilled, but once it is in, keep the soup below a boil. Boiling after enrichment risks separation, and with milk rather than cream it will catch and taste scorched.
- QuantitiesTwo quarts of stock plus a pint of cream is roughly 1.9 litres and 570 ml (an imperial pint) — a little under 2.5 litres of finished soup. Divided among the stated ten to twelve, that is about 200-250 ml a head.
- The stock does the workThere is nothing else here to carry flavour, so a weak stock gives a weak soup. Use a well-reduced, properly skimmed veal or chicken stock; any fat left on the surface will show as greasy beads once the starch thickens it.
- Cost in old money"1s. per quart" and a total of 4s. are pre-decimal shillings, useful only as a sign that this was the expensive version. The book offers milk as the economy substitute for cream for exactly that reason.
- SeasoningThe recipe seasons after thickening, as here; taste again at the end, since a starch-thickened soup can read as under-salted. White pepper rather than black keeps the appearance the name promises.
White soup was a fixture of English service from the eighteenth century onward, when it usually meant a stock enriched with pounded almonds and cream, served as the pale counterpart to a brown soup at the same table; in Pride and Prejudice Bingley speaks of waiting until Nicholls has made white soup enough for a ball, and the dish kept that association with evening entertaining for a century. By the time Cassell's was compiled, the almonds had largely dropped out and the thickening had passed to cornflour, a cheap industrial starch that spread rapidly through British kitchens in the second half of the nineteenth century. This version, offered simply as "another way," shows the shift plainly: the elaborate pounding is gone, and what remains is good stock, starch, and a pint of cream to make it respectable. It is as much a lesson in thickening liquid without lumps as it is a soup.