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Onion Cream Soup
Slice 6 large onions into 1 quart of mutton stock, and simmer for an hour. Rub through a colander, return to the fire, and thicken with 2 teaspoonfuls of butter rubbed to a paste with 2 of flour. Heat a pint of milk to the boiling point, and stir it into the soup. Season with salt, white pepper, and a teaspoonful of minced parsley.
A straightforward puree-thickened soup of the sort that filled the "cream soups" chapter of turn-of-the-century American manuals. The instructions are complete; only the stock, the sieving and the seasoning need comment.
- Mutton stockMutton was a normal household stock meat in 1900 and is now hard to find in the United States. Lamb bones give the closest flavour; a good chicken stock works but makes a much milder, sweeter soup.
- Rub through a colanderA colander here means forcing the softened onions through the perforations with the back of a spoon or a wooden pestle, which is a slow job. A food mill, a sieve, or a brief pass with a blender followed by a sieve accomplishes the same thing in a minute or two.
- Butter and flour amountsTwo teaspoons each of butter and flour is a very light thickening for three pints of liquid -- the body comes mostly from the onion puree. If you want a soup that coats the spoon, scale up to a tablespoon of each and cook the paste in for a couple of minutes so it loses its raw taste.
- Adding the milkHeating the pint of milk before it goes in keeps the soup from dropping off temperature. Do not let the finished soup boil after the milk is in.
- Simmer, not boilAn hour at a bare simmer sweetens the onions; a hard boil will reduce the quart of stock considerably and leave the soup too thick and salty once the seasoning goes in.
- SeasoningWhite pepper is specified so the finished soup stays pale, and it is worth honouring for appearance. Salt at the end, since a reduced stock can already be well seasoned.
- YieldA little under three pints once the stock has simmered down; enough for about four as a first course, or three as a light supper with bread.
Onion soup thickened and whitened with milk sits between two older traditions: the long-simmered French onion soups built on meat broth, and the British "white soups" that used cream or milk and a flour binding to produce a pale, genteel dish. Compilations of this kind commonly grouped such recipes together as "cream soups" -- a category defined less by cream than by the pale, sieved, flour-bound texture. The call for mutton stock is a period marker in itself: mutton was cheap and widely eaten in Britain and America into the early 1900s, and its strong fat carried onion well. As lamb and mutton fell out of American use over the twentieth century, later soups of this kind are generally built on chicken or veal stock.