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General Rule for Cream Vegetable Soups
Cook any vegetable such as green peas, carrots, turnips, parsnips, string beans, cauliflower, etc., in boiling salted water until tender, then rub through a fine sieve. Measure and for each cupful of stock take 3 cupfuls of milk.
Scald, thicken with 1 tablespoonful of butter and I of flour. Add the pulped vegetable, with salt and pepper to taste and simmer for ten minutes before serving. It is usually best, though not absolutely necessary, to rub again through a sieve before serving.
A Satisfying Soup Take 5 pounds from the neck or a smaller piece from the brisket, wash, put in the kettle, cover with 5 quarts of cold water and heat slowly.
Skim twice, add ½ cupful of washed barley then cover and simmer gently. In two hours add 1 cupful of chopped onion, 1 cupful of chopped carrot and (when in season) 1 cupful of chopped celery with salt and pepper to taste, then simmer for three hours longer. An hour before dinner drop in the necessary amount of peeled potatoes and take out the meat. Place the latter on a pan and put in a hot oven to crisp and brown.
Skim out the potatoes when done and brown them in a pan, using some of the fat skimmed from the soup.
Two related pieces: a master formula for cream vegetable soups and a long-simmered beef and barley soup that yields both soup and a meat course. Neither is difficult, but both leave a good deal to the cook's judgement.
- What "stock" means hereIn the cream soup rule it means the salted water the vegetable cooked in, not a separate meat stock. Save it when you drain; the ratio is 1 cup of that liquid to 3 cups of milk.
- The thickening is deliberately thinOne tablespoon each of butter and flour for a quart of liquid gives a soup barely thicker than milk, which is the period's idea of a cream soup. For a modern body, double the roux to 2 tablespoons of each.
- Sieving without a sieveA food mill or a blender followed by a strainer replaces the fine sieve. The second sieving before serving catches skins from peas and beans and is worth doing for those; cauliflower and parsnip rarely need it.
- Scald the milk separatelyHeat the milk to just below boiling, then whisk it into the butter-flour roux. Acidic pulp such as tomato can curdle milk, though tomato is not among the vegetables this rule lists.
- Ten minutes at a simmer, not a boilOnce the milk is in, hold it below boiling. A flour-bound milk soup can scorch on the bottom of a thin pan; use a heavy saucepan and stir.
- The cut for the second soupThe recipe says only "the neck" or "the brisket", presumably beef. Neck carries bone and connective tissue and will generally give a richer liquid than brisket; either is a slow-cooking cut and the five hours total is not excessive.
- "A hot oven"Roughly 400-450F for browning the boiled meat. Fifteen to twenty minutes is generally enough to crisp the outside; longer dries out meat that has already given most of itself to the pot.
- Skim and chillThe recipe calls for skimmed fat to brown the potatoes. Easiest if you make the soup a day ahead and lift the set fat off cold, keeping a few spoonfuls for the potatoes and discarding the rest.
- YieldFive quarts of water reduces over five hours to roughly three to four quarts of soup, serving eight to ten, with the meat as a separate dish.
The "general rule" format was common in economical cookery writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: rather than print twenty near-identical recipes, a book gave one proportion and left the cook to supply whatever the garden or the market had cheapest. Proportional formulas of this kind, bound with a spoonful each of butter and flour, recur in American household manuals of the period. The second recipe belongs to an older tradition still, the pot-au-feu principle of extracting a meal in two courses from one cheap cut: broth and barley for the table, the boiled meat crisped in the oven so it would not read as leftovers.