Potato Soup
Mash potatoes, pour on them one teacup cream, one large spoonful butter. Pour boiling water on them till you have the desired quantity. Boil until it thickens; season with salt, parsley, and pepper to your taste.--Mrs. R.E. Potato Soup.
Pour two quarts water on six or seven large peeled potatoes, adding two or three slices of middling; boil thoroughly done. Take them out, mash the potatoes well and return all to the same water, together with pepper, salt, one spoonful butter, and one quart milk, as for chicken soup.--Mrs. W.
Two contributed versions of the same soup, one meatless and thickened only by the potato itself, the other built on salt pork. Neither gives a yield or a cooking time, so the quantities below are the useful starting points.
- Teacup and spoonfulA teacup in nineteenth-century American receipts is smaller than the modern 8-ounce measuring cup; estimates range from about half to three-quarters of a cup. A "large spoonful" of butter is probably something like a tablespoon. Both are forgiving here, since the soup is thinned to taste with water.
- MiddlingMiddling (or middling meat, side meat) is the cut from the hog's side, between shoulder and ham — belly pork, cured and sometimes smoked, so either slab salt pork or streaky bacon will stand in. Two or three slices is only a few ounces. Taste before adding salt, as the pork carries a good deal of it.
- Salt the water lightlySalt at the end -- Mrs. W. adds the salt only at the end, with the milk. Boiling potatoes in salt-pork water concentrates the salt as the liquid reduces, and the final quart of milk will not rescue an oversalted pot.
- Do not boil the milk"Boil until it thickens" applies to the first version, which is water and cream-enriched mash. Once the quart of milk goes into the second version, keep it just below a simmer — a hard boil on a starchy, salty base will curdle it.
- MashingMash by hand, with a masher or a ricer. A food processor or stick blender turns boiled potato gluey within seconds because it ruptures the starch cells.
- "As for chicken soup"The phrase appears to point back to another receipt in the same book rather than describing a step here: finish it the same way. What that finishing amounted to is not stated on this page.
- YieldSix or seven large potatoes with two quarts water and a quart of milk should give somewhere in the region of three quarts of soup, less whatever boils away. The first version scales to whatever quantity of mashed potato you have on hand, which is its point.
- ParsleyIn the first version the parsley is a seasoning, not a garnish. Chop it fine and add it near the end so it keeps its colour and grassiness.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathers receipts from named Virginia housekeepers, which is why two quite different potato soups sit side by side under one heading with only initials to distinguish them — Mrs. R. E. and Mrs. W. The pairing is instructive: the first is made with mashed potatoes, enriched with cream, while the second is a deliberate soup built from raw potatoes and a few slices of cured side meat. Potato soup of this sort belongs to the long European tradition of potage bound by starch rather than flour or egg, and its appearance in a post-war Virginia household book, thinned with water and stretched with milk, reflects a kitchen economy in which boiling water was free.