Home › Soups without Meat › Squash Soup
Squash Soup
One cupful of cold boiled squash run through a colander; beat into this 1 teaspoonful each of salt and of sugar, a little pepper and a pinch of mace, 1 tablespoonful of onion juice, and 2 of minced celery. Place this on the stove, stirring constantly until it becomes very hot.
Have ready a quart of heated milk, with a pinch of soda. Stir 2 tablespoonfuls of butter and 1 of flour into the milk. Mix the hot squash and the milk well together in the tureen and serve.
Turnip soup can be made in the same way.
A quick cream soup built from leftover cooked squash, in the late-nineteenth-century style where the thickening is stirred into hot milk rather than cooked as a roux. It comes together in about fifteen minutes if the squash is already cooked.
- The hinge: keep the milk below a boilThe pinch of soda is there to neutralize acid in the squash so the milk does not curdle when the two are combined. Hold the milk just under a simmer, and add the squash to the milk rather than the other way round, in a warmed tureen or the pan off the heat.
- What squash to useThis means a dense winter squash — Hubbard, butternut, kabocha — boiled or steamed and drained well. One cupful of purée is roughly 8 oz. Summer squash carries too much water and gives a thin, watery soup.
- Run through a colanderA colander here is doing the work of a food mill: pushing the flesh through to break up strings and skin fragments. A food mill, ricer, or a brief go with a blender all do it faster.
- Onion juiceA period ingredient that gives onion flavour without pieces or long cooking. Grate an onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve; a tablespoon takes roughly half a medium onion.
- The butter and flourStirred straight into hot milk, a tablespoon of raw flour will not thicken cleanly and can taste pasty. Cook the butter and flour together for a minute or two first, then whisk in the milk gradually — the result is the same thin cream base the recipe intends.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt for a quart of milk plus a cup of squash is reasonable, but add it in stages and taste at the end. Mace is the outer coat (aril) of nutmeg and is usually described as lighter and more floral; a grating of nutmeg substitutes directly.
- The celeryTwo tablespoons of raw minced celery will stay crunchy in a soup this brief. Sweat it with the squash purée for a few minutes if you want it soft, or leave it as a deliberate texture.
- YieldAbout five cups — four modest first-course servings. It thickens as it stands and can be loosened with more hot milk.
Meatless soups filled a real need in nineteenth-century American households: Friday and Lenten observance in Catholic homes, economy everywhere else, and the practical problem of what to do with vegetables left from yesterday's dinner. This one begins with cold boiled squash, which tells you it was written for a cook facing a bowl of leftovers rather than a whole squash. Onion juice, pressed from a grated onion, was a favourite device of refined cookery of the era — it gave savour to pale creamed dishes without visible fragments, and appears constantly in the soup and sauce chapters of books from the 1880s onward. The closing line, that turnip soup can be made the same way, is characteristic of these compilations: the method was the point, and the vegetable was whatever the cellar held.