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Cream of Celery
Cook one cup of finely cut celery in a pint of water. Then mash through a colander and add one pint of milk, one-half pint of cream, and one teaspoon of Larkin Extract of Beef, one-fourth teaspoon of Larkin White Pepper, two teaspoons of Larkin Table Salt. Do not let boil after the cream is added but heat thoroughly. Any vegetable can be made into a cream soup in this same
A straightforward turn-of-the-century cream soup, written to sell the branded pantry goods that fill the rest of the book. The method is sound; the seasoning quantities and the brand names need translating.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmerOnce the milk and cream go in, keep the pot below a simmer, as the recipe directs. There is no flour here to stabilise the dairy, so it can separate if it boils.
- Larkin Extract of BeefA concentrated beef paste sold by the Larkin mail-order clubs. Substitute one teaspoon of beef bouillon paste, or one crushed cube dissolved in a little of the hot celery water.
- SaltTwo teaspoons for roughly five cups of liquid is a lot by current taste, especially alongside a salted beef concentrate. Start with half a teaspoon and correct at the end.
- Cooking the celeryNo time is given. Simmer the cup of cut celery, covered, until completely soft — 20 to 25 minutes — or it will not pass through the colander.
- Mash through a colanderThis means working the softened celery and its liquid through with the back of a spoon, keeping the pulp and the water. A food mill gives the same result; a blender or stick blender gives a smoother soup with no straining, though the coarse strings are worth removing.
- Half a pint of creamOne cup. What 'cream' meant here is not specified; heavy cream gives a richer soup, and half-and-half works and makes a lighter one.
- BodyWithout a roux this stays thin, more of a celery-flavoured hot milk. For a thicker soup, build on a tablespoon each of butter and flour cooked together before adding the liquids.
- YieldAbout five cups, allowing for a little reduction.
Good Things to Eat belongs to the great age of the manufacturer's cookbook, and the Larkin name printed against nearly every ingredient is the point of it: Larkin & Co. of Buffalo began as a soap works and grew into a mail-order house whose customers earned premiums and household goods by forming buying clubs, eventually carrying a full grocery line — extracts, spices, salt, baking powder. A booklet of recipes calling for those exact products kept the order forms coming. The recipe itself depends on cheap fresh milk and cream, blanched winter celery, and bottled beef extract all being available to an ordinary kitchen at once. The closing line — that any vegetable can be treated the same way — is the real lesson of the page.