Hygienic Soup
6 cups White Stock III 1/4 cup oatmeal 2 cups scalded milk 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour Salt and pepper Heat stock to boiling-point, add oatmeal, and boil one hour; rub through sieve, add milk, and thicken with butter and flour cooked together. Season with salt and pepper.
A plain oatmeal-thickened stock soup of the invalid-cookery school, built on a numbered white stock from elsewhere in the book. The one thing to watch is the oatmeal: what it should become is a smooth purée, not porridge with lumps.
- White Stock IIIA light stock given by number elsewhere in the book; the recipe here tells us nothing of its contents. Six cups of any light, low-sodium chicken or veal stock will do; avoid dark roasted stock, which fights the milk.
- Which oatmealThe hour of boiling suggests a coarse or steel-cut oatmeal rather than a flaked one, though the book does not specify. Rolled oats will dissolve to sludge in fifteen to twenty minutes and pass through the sieve just as well, so check them early if that is what you have.
- Boil one hourKeep it at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil and stir now and then; oatmeal settles and scorches on the bottom of a thin pan. Top up with a little water if it reduces much below the starting level.
- Rub through a sieveA fine-mesh sieve and a wooden spoon or ladle is the period method and gives a slightly grainy, satisfying body. A blender is faster and smoother, but push the purée through a sieve afterwards anyway to catch the oat husks.
- Scalded milkBring the milk just to the point where it steams and shivers at the edges, around 180F, then add it off the boil. Scalding is usually explained as a way of keeping raw milk sweet; with pasteurised milk it simply keeps the soup from dropping in temperature.
- Butter and flour cooked togetherA blond roux: cook the two tablespoons of each together two or three minutes until it smells nutty but takes no colour, then whisk it into the hot soup a little at a time. Simmer two or three minutes more so the flour loses its raw taste.
- SeasoningIf the stock has been made unsalted, this will need more salt than seems likely, and white pepper rather than black if you want to keep the colour clean. Taste after the roux goes in, not before.
- YieldAbout eight cups, serving six as a first course or four as a light supper. It thickens noticeably as it stands and on reheating; thin with stock or milk rather than water.
"Hygienic" in a cookbook of this vintage does not mean sanitary so much as wholesome and easily digested — the vocabulary of invalid cookery and the cooking-school movement, where soups were graded by how gently they sat on a weak stomach. Oatmeal earns its place here for the same reason it dominated Scottish and northern English kitchens: it thickens, it is cheap, and boiled long and sieved it yields a bland, slippery smoothness that was thought kind to the digestion. The numbered stock reference is a hallmark of the American cooking schools of the 1890s and 1900s, which taught a handful of foundation stocks by number and then built dozens of soups on them, so that a pupil learning this one was really learning a formula: stock, a starchy thickener boiled and sieved, scalded milk, and a butter-and-flour finish.