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Cream of Beet Soup
After boiling some young beets in salted water for an hour, turn out into cool water until they can be handled. Scrape all the skin off and chop them very fine. Put the beets in a saucepan with a pint of mutton stock, and simmer for fifteen minutes. Rub through a fine colander and place to one side of the range to keep hot. Pour a pint of milk upon 2 teaspoonfuls of butter and the same amount of flour, which have been cooked to a roux. When it becomes thick and smooth, add slowly the beet and mutton puree; season with salt and pepper, and when very hot serve.
A straightforward velouté-style purée soup: boiled beets thinned with stock, then bound into a milk-based white sauce. The order of combining is what keeps it from curdling.
- Add the purée to the sauce, not the reverseWhich is the order the recipe gives. Beet purée is mildly acidic, and a sauce built first is less likely to break; stream the hot beet and stock purée into it off direct heat.
- Mutton stockRarely sold now. Lamb stock is the nearest equivalent; a light beef or chicken stock works and gives a cleaner flavour that suits beets better than strong mutton does.
- "Cooked to a roux"Two teaspoons each of butter and flour to a pint of milk is a very thin binding — closer to a soup than a sauce. If you want body, use a tablespoon of each and cook it a minute or two without letting it colour.
- Boiling timeAn hour suits large mature beets. Young beets of 2 inches or less are tender in 25–35 minutes; test with a skewer rather than trusting the clock, since overcooked beets lose colour.
- Skins and stainingBoiling whole and unpeeled keeps the colour in. The skins slip off under cold water with thumb pressure — a knife is not needed. Beet juice stains wooden boards and cloth badly and the marks are hard to shift.
- "Rub through a fine colander"This means forcing the purée through with a wooden spoon or pestle, the nineteenth-century equivalent of a food mill. A blender plus a fine sieve gives a smoother result in less time.
- Range heat"One side of the range" was the cooler end of a wood or coal stove — a holding spot. Modern equivalent is the lowest burner setting or a covered pan off the heat.
- YieldA pint of stock and a pint of milk make roughly 4 cups: two generous or four small servings. A spoonful of sour cream and dill or caraway at the table is traditional with beets and welcome here.