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Milk Soup
1 pint (2 cups) milk 1 celery stalk 1 egg Salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg to taste 1/2 cupful soft bread crumbs Chop the celery and put it into an earthenware pan, add the bread crumbs and the milk; allow it to simmer for a quarter of an hour, then strain it.
Beat up the egg and add it to the soup; reheat it but do not allow it to boil again.
Season nicely with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.
A liaison-thickened celery and milk soup from the invalid-cookery chapter, where the aim was something bland, warm and easily digested. The printed page has lost the head of its ingredient list, so the quantities for celery, milk and egg have to be reconstructed.
- The missing quantitiesOnly "1/2 cupful soft bread crumbs" and the seasonings survive in this text; the celery, milk and egg amounts are genuinely absent rather than vague. Proportions of this type in the period run to roughly a pint of milk, two or three stalks of celery and one egg for a single invalid's portion, but that is inference, not what the book says.
- Do not let it boil after the eggThis is the hinge. Once the beaten egg goes in, hold the soup below a simmer — around 170-180F — and stir constantly. A boil curdles the egg into threads and the soup separates.
- Temper the eggWhisk a ladleful of the hot strained milk into the beaten egg before returning it to the pan. Adding the egg cold to the whole potful is how the original reads and is how it splits.
- The earthenware panThe recipe calls for an earthenware pan, i.e. a clay pot used on the stovetop rather than a baking dish. Modern glazed stoneware often cannot take direct heat; a heavy saucepan or an enamelled cast-iron pot behaves the same way and holds heat as well.
- Fifteen minutes is enoughA quarter of an hour softens the celery and lets the crumbs swell and thicken. Longer scorches milk on the base of the pan — keep the heat low and stir up from the bottom.
- StrainingThe book says only 'strain it'. The crumbs most likely act as a thickener rather than a texture, so pressing the solids through a sieve to push the celery pulp into the soup and leave the fibres behind is one reading; a stick blender before straining gives a smoother result.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use it lightly — a few strokes for a pint. Pre-ground nutmeg in a jar is flat and, in a soup this plain, the seasoning is most of the flavour.
- YieldOn the reconstructed quantities, one or two invalid servings, about a pint. It thickens as it cools and does not reheat well once the egg is in, so make only what will be eaten.
"Invalid cookery" was a standard division of English and American household manuals well into the twentieth century, when nursing the sick happened at home and the cook was expected to produce food that was warm, mild and swallowable without much chewing. Milk soups thickened with bread and finished with a beaten egg belong to a whole family of such dishes — panada, milk gruel, egg-and-milk caudles — that gave protein and calories in liquid form; celery earned its place partly for flavour and partly because it was widely held in that period to be soothing to the nerves, a claim repeated in cookbooks and patent-medicine advertising alike. The earthenware pot recommended here suits the purpose: slow, even, retained heat suits milk, which catches and scorches on thin metal over a direct flame.