Artichoke Soup
2 cups scalded milk 1 egg 1 teaspoon salt 1 slice onion few grains cayenne Cook artichokes and onion in water till tender. Drain, press through sieve, and return to water. Melt butter; add flour and scalded milk. Cook until mixture thickens. Combine mixtures, add seasonings, and just before serving pour on to beaten egg. 1 cup Lima beans
The text as printed is incomplete: the ingredient list gives the milk, egg and seasonings but not the artichokes, butter or flour, all of which the method calls for. Treat it as a thin cream soup built on a white sauce and fill in the gaps before you start.
- Which artichokeIn American books of this period an "artichoke soup" often means the Jerusalem artichoke (sunchoke) rather than the globe artichoke, though this text does not say which. Sunchokes peel and boil like potatoes and press through a sieve easily; globe artichoke hearts would work but give a very different, greener soup.
- Missing quantitiesThe original never states how much artichoke, butter or flour to use, so any figure is a reconstruction. A workable proportion for 2 cups of milk is about 1 lb prepared artichokes with 2 cups of their cooking water, and 2 tablespoons each butter and flour for the sauce.
- The stray Lima beansThe trailing "1 cup Lima beans" does not belong to this soup; it appears to be a stray line carried over from an adjacent recipe. Ignore it.
- Scalded milkHeated to just below the boil, around 180F, when small bubbles ring the pan. With raw milk it served to check the milk; with pasteurized milk it mainly saves time, and cold milk whisked into the roux works as well.
- The egg is the hingeThe beaten egg goes into the tureen and the hot soup is poured onto it, off the heat. Never return the pan to the burner afterwards or the egg will curdle into threads. If a lightly cooked egg is a concern for whoever is eating, use a pasteurized one.
- Sieve or blenderPressing through a sieve was the usual route to a smooth pur does it in seconds, though a pass through a fine sieve afterwards still catches the fibrous skin flecks that sunchokes shed.
- Seasoning"Few grains cayenne" is a pinch, no more; the point is warmth behind the sweetness of the root, not heat. Add the salt after combining, since the artichoke water concentrates as it reduces.
- YieldRoughly four cups finished, serving four as a first course. It thickens noticeably as it stands and is best ladled out at once.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, is a general household manual with a chocolate department attached, and its soup chapter appears to follow something close to the Boston Cooking School pattern: a vegetable cooked soft, sieved, and bound with a milk-and-flour sauce. That formula, standardised by Fannie Farmer's generation of teachers, let one method cover celery, pea, corn, Lima bean and artichoke with nothing changed but the vegetable — which may be how the Lima bean line came to be sitting at the bottom of this page. The artichoke in question, Helianthus tuberosus, is a North American sunflower relative that colonial and nineteenth-century kitchens grew freely; it fell out of fashion for much of the twentieth century and returned under the tidier name sunchoke.