Home › Soups › Cream of Peanut Soup
Cream of Peanut Soup
This soup affords a delicious change from the ordinary and is sure to be appreciated by those who do not dislike peanuts. To make it one can buy the peanut butter prepared or purchase the peanuts and pass them twice through the chopping machine. In this way one is quite sure of obtaining the fresh butter, and without fresh peanut butter the soup cannot be made with any degree of success. Add ½ pint of peanut butter to 1 quart of boiling milk, season with I bay leaf, a little salt, celery salt or extract, and 1 tablespoonful of grated onion. Cook for six minutes in a double boiler, and then thicken with 1 tablespoonful of flour or corn-starch, moistened in a little cold milk. Cook till smooth, strain through a very fine sieve, and serve at once with croutons made of Graham or entire wheat bread.
This recipe can be used for chestnuts, first boiling and chopping or mashing the nuts, and for any other kind of nuts, or for a combination of two or more kinds used together.
A late-Victorian nut soup that works well today, provided the peanut butter is loose enough to disperse. The whole success of it lies in that one point.
- The hinge: unstabilized peanut butterThe hinge: loose, unstabilized peanut butter -- The original insists on fresh-ground butter without saying why; rancidity in stored nut pastes was the likely worry. In a modern kitchen the practical point is that commercial stabilized peanut butter, with its added hydrogenated oil, tends to clump in hot milk rather than disperse. Use a natural grind (peanuts only) or grind your own, and slacken it with a few spoonfuls of the warm milk before it goes into the pot.
- Half a pint of peanut butterThat is one US cup, roughly 8 to 9 ounces by weight, to one quart (4 cups) of milk. It gives a very rich, thick soup by modern taste; two-thirds of a cup makes a lighter one without changing the method.
- "Pass them twice through the chopping machine"A hand-cranked food chopper clamped to the table. A food processor does the same job in two or three minutes, though it will need scraping down; the nuts should go past the crumbly stage to a loose paste.
- The double boiler is not optionalMilk with a heavy load of nut solids scorches readily over direct heat, and scorched peanut is unmistakable. Six minutes over simmering water is enough to bring the flavors together.
- ThickeningOne tablespoon of flour or cornstarch slaked in cold milk into a quart of already-thick soup is a light touch; cook it two or three minutes after adding so the raw starch taste goes. Cornstarch sets firmer than flour, so start with the flour if you want a pourable soup.
- Celery extractA commercial celery-flavored essence sold alongside vanilla and lemon extracts in 1900 groceries. Celery salt is the surviving equivalent and the recipe already offers it; a rib of celery simmered in the milk and removed with the bay leaf does the same work.
- StrainingPushing a cup of peanut butter through a very fine sieve is slow work. Do it while the soup is hot, with a ladle, and expect to discard a little coarse residue. A blender first makes the sieve go much faster.
- Yield and servingAbout four to six cups after straining, so four small bowls. It is filling; serve it in cups rather than soup plates, with the whole-wheat croutons, which cut the richness better than white bread would.
Peanut butter was a new thing when this was written. It came out of the health-food and sanitarium cookery of the 1890s, where nuts were ground into pastes and "butters" as protein for meatless tables, and it is often said to have reached ordinary groceries only in the early years of the twentieth century, though the timing is uncertain. That novelty explains the recipe's slightly defensive tone -- "a delicious change from the ordinary," "those who do not dislike peanuts" -- and its careful instruction on how to make the butter yourself if the store had none. Cream soups thickened with a nut paste and finished with milk were a standing feature of economical cookery of the period, cheap protein dressed in the form of a French potage, and the closing note that the same method serves for chestnuts or any mixture of nuts is the real point of the entry: it is a formula, not a single dish. Peanut soup itself has a longer history in the American South, generally traced to the groundnut stews of West Africa carried over with the enslaved cooks who made them, though this milk-and-flour version belongs squarely to the northern white-sauce tradition rather than that line.