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Potato Soup (For an Invalid)
One generous tablespoon of mashed potato. Add gradually a pint of new milk. Place on the stove and when hot stir in a heaping teaspoon of cornstarch dissolved in cold milk. Let boil up several times. Season with salt and celery salt, or a sprig of parsley. The potatoes must be free from lump. Rice may be substituted if liked, but must also be mashed and the milk added slowly.- M. M. Willard.
A thin, smooth milk soup built on a spoonful of leftover mashed potato — sickroom food, meant to be swallowed easily and digested without effort. It comes together in under ten minutes.
- The hinge: no lumpsA tablespoon of mashed potato beaten into a pint of milk will stay grainy unless the potato is pressed through a sieve or ricer first, then slackened with a little of the milk to a paste before the rest goes in. The recipe's own instruction to add the milk gradually points the same way.
- "New milk"Fresh whole milk, straight from the day's milking and unskimmed. Whole milk is the modern equivalent; skim will give a watery result at this dilution.
- Cornstarch quantityA heaping teaspoon to a pint is a light thickening — the soup should coat a spoon, not set. Slake it in a tablespoon or two of cold milk before it goes into the hot pan.
- "Let boil up several times"Cornstarch needs to reach a full boil to thicken and to lose its raw taste, but repeated hard boiling in a milk base scorches the bottom of the pan. Bring it to a boil, stir constantly for a minute, and take it off.
- Celery saltStill sold, and much the same product: ground celery seed cut with fine salt. Use it sparingly, and season at the end, as the recipe directs.
- The rice variationPlain boiled white rice, mashed as the recipe directs, and better still pressed through the same sieve.
- YieldOne pint, or two small cups.
Most general cookbooks of the late nineteenth century seem to have carried a chapter like this one, set apart from the family cooking and addressed to whoever was nursing at home. Hospitals were for the poor and the desperate; illness was managed in the bedroom, and the cook was expected to produce a rotating series of gruels, beef teas, milk toasts and slops that a weak stomach could take. The governing theory was blandness and dilution — invalid food was deliberately stripped of anything strong-flavored or fibrous, on the widely held view that digestion was itself an exertion the sick could ill afford. Hence the sieved potato, the milk, the barely-there seasoning of celery salt or a single sprig of parsley. The signed attribution to M. M. Willard reflects a habit common across many compilations of printing contributed recipes under the contributor's name, which is why the invalid chapters of such books often read as a collection of individual household habits rather than a single authorial voice.