Home › Soups › Potato Soup (With Salt Pork)
Potato Soup (With Salt Pork)
Eight large potatoes, one large onion, one-half pound of salt pork cut into strips, three whole cloves and one sprig of parsley. Boil all two hours, then strain through a sieve and season to taste, adding one tablespoon of butter and one pint of cream. Let it come to a boil and serve. - Mrs Frank Rockefeller.
A plain cream-of-potato soup that assumes you know how much water to use and how salt pork behaves. Two adjustments do most of the work: cut the cooking time and taste before you salt.
- The missing liquidThe recipe never says how much water, which is the one real gap. Cover the potatoes, onion and pork by an inch or so — roughly 2 quarts for eight large potatoes — and top up if it reduces below the vegetables.
- Two hours is too longPotatoes are soft in 20 to 30 minutes and the pork will have given up its fat and salt well before an hour. Simmer 40 minutes at most; beyond that you are only boiling away liquid and dulling the onion.
- Salt porkModern salt pork is still heavily cured, so the soup will season itself. Add no salt until after the cream goes in, then correct. If your pork is very salty, blanch the strips in water for five minutes and discard that water.
- Fish out the aromaticsThree whole cloves and a parsley sprig are meant to be removed, not pushed through the sieve. Cloves in particular will dominate if they end up in the purée, so lift them out before straining.
- Straining through a sieveThis is a purée step, not a clarifying one — the potato and onion are pressed through, and the pork strips, which the recipe does not say what to do with, will be left behind in the sieve. A food mill or ricer gives the intended texture; a blender turns potato gluey, so use it briefly if at all.
- Butter and creamOne pint of cream to eight potatoes is rich by any standard. Modern heavy cream will give the richest result, though the cream a household of the period skimmed was not standardised and may well have been thinner; half-and-half or whole milk thins it sensibly. Bring it just to a boil as directed and no further, or the cream may separate.
- YieldDepending on how much water you use, expect roughly 3 quarts — eight to ten servings as a first course, six as a main with bread.
Salt pork is doing the seasoning work here: before stock cubes and commercial broth, a half pound of cured pork was a cheap way to get fat and savour into a pot of water. Whole cloves and a sprig of parsley turn up often in nineteenth-century soups, where a modern cook might reach for bay and thyme. The signed attribution is the sort found in community and charity cookbooks of the period, which gathered contributions from local women, sometimes from prominent families. Recipes collected that way tend to read like this one: written from memory for someone who already knows how much water goes in a soup pot.