Cream Purees
Proceed exactly as in the vegetable puree, using milk or mixed milk and cream instead of stock. The thickening (for holding the solids in suspension) in cream soups should be made of butter and flour rubbed to a paste. Ella Morris Kretschmar.
This is a variation note rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the vegetable puree method in hand and swaps the liquid. The useful information is in the thickening, which is the part most likely to go wrong.
- Butter and flour rubbed to a pasteThis is essentially what is called beurre manié: soft butter and flour, usually in roughly equal weights, worked together raw. Because the flour is not cooked first, the soup should simmer briefly afterwards to lose the raw flour taste. The recipe itself gives neither proportions nor a method of adding it.
- How muchFor a thickening that holds solids in suspension without making gravy, allow roughly 1 tablespoon each of butter and flour per pint (2 cups) of liquid. Vegetables that are already starchy — potato, dried pea, chestnut — need half that or none.
- Milk or mixed milk and creamThe recipe leaves the proportion to the cook. Whole milk alone gives a thin result by modern palates; using half-and-half for part of the liquid moves it closer to a richer soup.
- Do not let it boil once the milk is inThis is the hinge. Hold the soup just below a simmer. Acidic vegetables such as tomato and sorrel will curdle milk; add the hot puree to the hot milk rather than the reverse, and serve promptly.
- SievingThe vegetable puree it refers back to means vegetables cooked soft and pressed through a sieve. A blender does the work faster, but a pass through a fine strainer afterwards still makes the difference between a cream soup and a thick vegetable mash.
- SeasoningMilk mutes salt in a way stock does not, so a cream puree needs noticeably more salt than the same vegetable finished with broth. Season at the end, off the heat, and add white pepper rather than black if appearance matters.
- YieldNone is given. As a working estimate, about 1 cup of vegetable puree to 3 cups of milk would serve four as a first course.
Cream soups of this kind are often said to have been a staple of the American genteel dinner, sitting where a clear consommé might otherwise have gone in a French menu and requiring no long-simmered stock — a real advantage in a household without a permanent stockpot. The practice of giving one full method (here, the vegetable puree) and then a string of one-line variations was standard editorial economy in cookbooks of the period; readers were expected to work back and forth between entries. The butter-and-flour paste specified is the classic beurre manié, generally traced to French professional practice, where it was valued precisely because it could be stirred into a soup already made without starting a roux from scratch.