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Onion and Cucumber Soup
Cut and chop fine 2 large white onions and 3 cucumbers. Fry them for five minutes without browning in 1 tablespoonful of butter; add 1 pint of boiling water and simmer for forty-five minutes. Press through a sieve, getting as much pulp as possible. In another saucepan mix together 1 tablespoonful of butter and 1 tablespoonful of flour, add gradually 1 pint of hot milk and stir until smoothly thickened.
Gradually mix this with the cucumber purée, season highly with salt and pepper and simmer for five minutes. Serve with croutons.
Purée of Turnips Pare and thinly slice a number of white turnips and boil until tender in salted water. Drain and rub through a sieve. In a saucepan melt 1 tablespoonful of butter, add 1 teaspoonful of salt, 1/4 of a teaspoonful of white pepper and 2 tablespoonfuls of flour. When blended add gradually 1 cupful of good white stock and 2 cupfuls of milk, stirring until creamy and smooth. Add a little of this to the pulped turnips, of which there should be I good cupful; add to the contents of the saucepan, simmer for three minutes, adding more seasoning if necessary, and serve with croutons. If no stock is on hand all milk may be used.
A simple velvet soup: vegetables sweated in butter, simmered, sieved, then let down with a white sauce. Two things decide whether it tastes of anything — the cucumbers and the seasoning.
- Don't let the vegetables colour"Fry them for five minutes without browning" means sweating gently over low heat. Browning would dull the colour of the finished soup and coarsen the cucumber's flavour.
- CucumbersCucumbers of this period were generally smaller field varieties than today's large waxed ones, so judge by volume rather than count. Peel them, and if the seeds are large and watery scrape them out.
- Forty-five minutes is longThe simmer is there to draw out flavour as much as to soften. Modern thin-skinned cucumbers collapse much sooner, and a shorter simmer keeps more of the fresh green note.
- SievingA food mill or fine sieve was the only option; a blender followed by a pass through a fine strainer gives more yield and a smoother body. Push hard -- the recipe asks for as much pulp as possible.
- The white sauceEqual butter and flour, with the hot milk added gradually and stirred, prevents lumps. The recipe's final five-minute simmer should be gentle.
- "Season highly"Not an exaggeration. Cucumber and onion purée thinned with milk is very mild and needs more salt than the volume suggests. Taste at the end, hot, when the salt reads true.
- YieldThe sieved vegetables plus a pint of milk give something under two pints, or about four small first-course servings. Croutons are not decoration here; the soup is soft throughout and wants the contrast.
Sieved vegetable soups bound with a milk-and-flour sauce were the backbone of the economical soup chapter in early twentieth-century American cookbooks: they stretched a pint of milk and a couple of onions into a course, and they used up garden produce that was too soft or too plentiful to sell or serve raw. Cucumber cooked rather than eaten raw strikes modern readers as odd, but the practice is old and widespread — cucumbers appear stewed, stuffed and puréed in English and French cookery well before they became almost exclusively a salad vegetable — and a household with a summer glut had every reason to cook them. The butter-and-flour liaison, folded in from a second saucepan rather than made in the soup itself, is the standard technique of the period, taught in the cooking-school books that shaped collections like this one.