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Cream of Mixed Vegetable Soup
Two heaping tablespoons each diced onion, carrot and celery, and one tablespoon of turnip.
Put three tablespoons of butter into saucepan and when hot add the vegetables. Cook ten or fifteen minutes, taking care not to let them brown, add two tablespoons of flour, mix well with the butter and vegetables. Put into double boiler three pints of milk, small bay leaf, and a sprig of parsley. When the milk is hot, stir in the vegetables, season with salt and pepper, and simmer gently for half an hour. Beat the yolks of two eggs, and stir in half cup of cream, add to the soup and cook a moment and it is ready to serve, straining or not, as preferred.
— Mrs. Frederic E. Craigie
A straightforward cream soup built on a butter-and-flour base thickened a second time with an egg-and-cream liaison. The only delicate step is the finish.
- The egg liaisonOnce the yolks and cream go in, the soup must not boil or the yolks will curdle into threads. Temper by whisking a ladle of hot soup into the yolk-cream mixture first, then return it to the pan and heat only until it thickens slightly.
- Sweat, don't brownThe instruction not to let the vegetables color is the point of the dish: this is meant to be pale and mild. Keep the heat low and cover the pan if the butter starts to sizzle hard.
- Butter and flour proportionsThree tablespoons butter to two of flour leaves more fat than a standard roux. Two tablespoons of flour will not thicken three pints of milk to any body on its own; the eggs and cream do most of the finishing work.
- The double boilerUsed here to keep the milk from scorching, which mattered more on a coal range with no low setting. A heavy-bottomed saucepan over low heat works, stirring now and then.
- StrainingStrained, the vegetable solids come out and you are left with a smooth, thin, pale soup; unstrained, the small dice stay in. A blender gives a third option the author did not have -- puree before adding the eggs, not after.
- SeasoningThree pints of milk needs considerably more salt than cooks expect, and the bay and parsley should come out before serving. A grating of nutmeg is a period-appropriate addition.
- YieldAbout three pints finished, or four to six first-course servings. It does not reheat well once the yolks are in, so make what you will eat.
Cream soups of this kind — butter, a flour binding, milk, and a final enrichment of egg yolk and cream — came into American home cooking through the cooking-school movement of the 1880s and 1890s, when Boston and New York instructors taught a simplified French repertoire to middle-class households. The egg-yolk-and-cream finish is the classic liaison. Community books like this one collected receipts under contributors' names as a form of local credit and as fundraising.