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CHAPTER X: Cream
THICK SAUCE FOR FOUNDATION OF CROQUETTES 4 tablespoonfuls of fat 1/4 teaspoonful of pepper 1/3 cup of flour 1 cup of liquid 1/4 teaspoonful of salt Prepare in one of the three ways given previously, page 143. THIN SAUCE FOR FOUNDATION OF CREAM SOUPS 1 tablespoonful of butter 1/4 teaspoonful of pepper 1 tablespoonful of flour 1 cup of milk, thin cream or 1/4 teaspoonful of salt white broth CREAM SOUPS It is but a step from cream sauce to cream soup. Use milk or thin cream in making the cup of sauce, then add from half to a whole cup of any kind of puree at hand. By puree is meant any food substance cooked (usually in water, though in some cases, as with tomatoes, water is unnecessary) and pressed through a sieve. Sometimes more and sometimes less of the article may be pressed through the sieve; dilute the portion in the sieve with some of the liquid that has already dripped through so as to push through as much of the article as is possible. The larger part of tomatoes, onions, spinach, peas and beans will pass the sieve; less of celery, green corn and asparagus may be pressed through, on account of the tough cellular structure of the latter vegetables. Cooked fish and meat, free from skin and bone, then pounded smooth and passed through the sieve may be used in these soups. The fish and meat should be diluted with fish or meat broth, or the resulting soup will be too thick. Salt and pepper, and, occasionally, a little more hot milk or broth are needed. A gravy strainer, set into one of the parts of a small double boiler, and a wooden pestle are indispensable in reducing the cooked material to the puree form. With these soups serve croutons, toasted crackers, or pulled bread.
CROUTONS FOR CREAM SOUPS Cut stale bread into slices from one-fourth to one-third an inch thick; remove the crusts, spread the surfaces with butter, and cut the slices into pieces an inch square. Set these into the oven to brown, turning to brown both sides. TOASTED CRACKERS Split the common Boston or soda cracker, toast over the fire or in the oven, spread lightly with butter and serve. These may be spread with butter and then browned in the oven, but they are more wholesome spread with butter after they are browned.
PULLED BREAD Remove the crust from a loaf of fresh-baked bread and cut and pull the loaf into halves, lengthwise; repeat this cutting and pulling until the pieces are about an inch thick; they may be the length of the loaf or shorter. Dry these in a slack oven until they snap when broken. They should be amber in color, Reheat before serving.
These are the two working ratios of the white-sauce chapter — one thick enough to bind croquettes, one thin enough to carry a soup — plus three things to float on top. Everything here depends on getting the flour-to-liquid proportion right for the job.
- The two ratiosThick sauce is about 4 tablespoons fat to 1/3 cup flour to 1 cup liquid, which sets firm enough to cut and shape when cold. Thin sauce is 1 tablespoon each of butter and flour per cup of liquid. An intermediate proportion, around 2 tablespoons each, is what modern recipes usually mean by a medium white sauce.
- The three ways on page 143Page 143 is not reproduced here, but the standard methods of combining fat, flour and liquid are: cook flour into melted fat and add hot liquid; cream cold butter with flour and stir into hot liquid; or blend flour with a little cold liquid and stir into the rest. All three work.
- White brothAn unbrowned stock — veal, chicken or fish, made from bones that were not roasted first. Any light unsalted stock does. Since the recipe already carries 1/4 teaspoon salt per cup, use unsalted or low-sodium stock or the soup will be over-seasoned.
- Sieve and pestleThe gravy strainer and wooden pestle can be replaced by a food mill or a blender followed by a sieve. Keep the sieving step for celery, corn and asparagus — a blender chops the fibrous cell walls small but does not remove them, and the texture stays gritty.
- Chilling croquette baseThe thick sauce needs to be spread out and refrigerated until cold and firm — several hours or overnight — before it can be shaped and crumbed. Warm croquette mixture will burst in the fat.
- Oven temperaturesThe book gives no figures. For browning croutons and crackers a moderate oven, in the region of 350°F, watched closely, since buttered bread goes from amber to black quickly. "Slack oven" for pulled bread is generally taken as a low oven, roughly 250-300°F, held long enough to dry the pieces through so they snap rather than bend.
- Boston crackerA large, thick, plain cracker of the kind meant to be split into two rounds, as the recipe directs. A common cracker or water biscuit is the nearest modern equivalent.
- YieldOne cup of thin sauce plus half to a full cup of purée gives roughly two generous soup cups, in keeping with the book's premise. The thick sauce yields about a cup and a half of croquette base; the recipe does not say how many croquettes that makes.
Cooking for Two came out of the Boston Cooking School world, where the white sauce was taught as a single technique with a sliding scale of thickness — thin for soups, medium for creamed dishes, thick for croquettes and soufflé bases — an idea generally traced to Fannie Farmer's tabulation of the proportions in the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. The chapter's real subject is economy of method: learn one ratio and a sieve, and any leftover vegetable, fish or scrap of meat becomes a cream soup. Pulled bread is older and English, a way of getting crisp amber shards from a fresh loaf without the flat regularity of toast, and it appears in nineteenth-century books as the polite accompaniment to soup and cheese. The insistence that crackers are "more wholesome" buttered after browning rather than before reflects a period conviction that heated fat was hard on digestion — a piece of household physiology that has not survived.