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Cream Peanut Soup
1 pint milk, or 1 cup milk and 1 cup water 1 tablespoon peanut butter 2 tablespoons shredded cocoanut 2 teaspoons flour 1/3 teaspoon salt Rub the nut butter smooth with the liquid. Add the cocoanut. Steep fifteen or twenty minutes in a double boiler. Strain out the cocoanut. Reheat, and thicken with the flour stirred smooth with a little cold water. Add salt.
A thin, delicate milk soup flavored by steeping rather than by bulk — the coconut is a seasoning that gets strained out, not an ingredient you eat. It comes together in about half an hour and serves two as a first course.
- The hinge: smooth the peanut butter firstRub the peanut butter to a paste with a few tablespoons of the cold liquid before adding the rest. Dropped straight into warm milk it seizes into lumps that never disperse.
- Peanut butter to useOld-style nut butter was simply ground peanuts, sometimes steamed rather than roasted. Use a natural grind with no added sugar, hydrogenated fat or emulsifiers, or the soup turns cloyingly sweet and slick.
- CocoanutThis means dried shredded coconut, unsweetened. Sweetened flake, the standard supermarket bag today, will push the soup toward dessert.
- Double boilerNot fussiness — milk with a starch-and-fat suspension in it scorches easily over direct heat. A heatproof bowl over simmering water works as well as a purpose-made pan.
- Steeping timeFifteen to twenty minutes is enough to draw the coconut flavor out. Longer will not add much and increases the chance of a skin forming; stir once or twice.
- ThickeningTwo teaspoons of flour in a pint is a very light body, barely more than a cream. Stir the flour smooth with a tablespoon of cold water, add it to the reheated soup, and let it cook two or three minutes so the raw-flour taste goes.
- SaltA third of a teaspoon assumes unsalted peanut butter. If yours is salted, start with a pinch and taste at the end.
- ServingYields about a pint, two small cups. Best served immediately; reheating it hard will curdle it.
Nut butters were a mainstay of American vegetarian and health-reform cooking around the turn of the twentieth century, when cookbooks in that tradition needed rich-tasting soups without meat stock. Peanut butter, then still a relatively new commercial product and promoted in sanitarium kitchens, gave body and fat where a bone broth would ordinarily have done the work. The coconut here is used the way a European kitchen would use a bay leaf or an onion stuck with cloves — steeped for its perfume and then discarded, a trick that stretches a tablespoon of nut butter into something that reads as a proper cream soup.