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Cream of Cabbage Soup
Chop the cabbage fine, and cook in boiling salted water until quite tender. Just before serving pour off most of the water; add mill, pepper, and little more salt, if necessary, and thicken with flour to a creamy consistency. This soup deserves to be much more generally known than it is.
A bare-bones formula with no quantities at all, typical of the terse cream-soup entries in this book. The proportions below are the ones that make it work as written.
- Working quantitiesAbout 1 small head of cabbage (1 to 1 1/2 lb) shredded fine, water to cover, then 3 to 4 cups of milk. This gives roughly six servings.
- "Mill" is milkThe line calls for milk to be added once most of the cooking water is poured off. Whole milk gives the body the recipe is after; skim milk leaves it thin and faintly grey.
- Don't drain it allThe instruction is to pour off most of the water, not all. Keeping a cup or so of the cabbage liquor is what carries the flavour into the milk.
- ThickeningFlour stirred straight into hot milk will lump. Slake 2 to 3 tablespoons in a little cold milk first, or cook it in butter as a roux and add the hot liquid to that.
- Heat after the milk goes inOnce milk is added, hold it below a boil. A hard boil risks catching or separating a thin milk-and-flour soup.
- Cooking the cabbage"Quite tender" for finely shredded cabbage is 10 to 15 minutes. Cook it uncovered so the sulphurous notes escape.
- SeasoningPepper and salt are all the original asks for. A grating of nutmeg, or a bay leaf steeped in the milk, is a common enough addition in milk-based soups of this kind and steadies the flavour.
Cream soups occupy substantial space in household cookery books of this period because they turned a cheap vegetable and a quart of milk into a course that could open a meal. Cabbage was among the cheapest, stored through winter in cellars and barrels, and it carried a reputation as coarse fare -- which may be why the compiler adds that the soup "deserves to be much more generally known." The method is a familiar one: boil the vegetable, dress it with milk, bind with flour. What sets this version apart from many cream soups is that the cabbage is left in pieces rather than sieved to a puree, making it closer to a plain milk-thickened vegetable soup than to a strained veloute.