Squash Soup
3/4 cup cooked squash 3 tablespoons flour 1 quart milk 1 teaspoon salt 1 slice onion Few grains pepper 2 tablespoons butter 1/4 teaspoon celery salt Rub squash through a sieve before measuring. Scald milk with onion, remove onion, and add milk to squash; season, and bind.
A cream-of-squash soup built on the standard white-sauce method of the period; the one-word instruction "bind" at the end carries most of the work.
- What "bind" meansMelt the 2 tablespoons butter, stir in the 3 tablespoons flour, cook a minute without colouring, then whisk in the hot squash-and-milk mixture off the heat and return it to a simmer until it thickens. Adding hot liquid to a raw flour-and-butter paste all at once is what causes lumps; go in gradually.
- Squash to useA dense winter squash — butternut, Hubbard, kabocha — roasted or steamed until soft. Summer squash carries too much water and will thin the soup. The 3/4 cup is measured after sieving, so start with roughly a pound of raw squash.
- SievingA food mill or fine sieve gives the smooth body intended here. A blender or stick blender does the same job faster, but push the puree through a sieve afterwards if the squash was stringy.
- Scalding the milkBring the quart of milk to just below a boil with the onion slice, about 180F, then pull it off and let the onion steep a few minutes before removing it. Whole milk gives the texture the recipe assumes; skim milk will taste thin.
- Celery saltStill sold, and worth using rather than substituting — with only onion, salt and pepper beside it, it is doing real seasoning work. If you have none, a stalk of celery scalded with the milk gets close; taste and salt to suit.
- Consistency and finishingThree tablespoons of flour to a quart of liquid gives a light soup rather than a thick puree. Do not let it boil hard once bound, or it can thin out again and catch on the pan bottom.
- YieldAbout five cups — four generous first-course servings. Croutons or a spoonful of cream are natural additions at the table.
Squash soup belongs to a whole family of American cream soups that fill the soup chapters of turn-of-the-century cookery books: a vegetable puree, scalded milk flavoured with a slice of onion, and a butter-and-flour binding, repeated with celery, corn, peas, potato or asparagus in place of the squash. Because the pattern was so standard, the instructions here can be telegraphic — a reader working through such a book had already met scalding, sieving and binding, and needed only the proportions. Squash itself was a cheap and abundant keeper, native to the Americas and stored through the winter in cellars, so it turns up often in household books of the era.