Cabbage Soup
4 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon salt teaspoon pepper few grains cayenne 2 tablespoons flour Chop cabbage, add water, and cook until tender; press through a sieve. Melt butter, add chopped onion, cook slowly five minutes, add flour, scalded milk, cabbage mixture; cook five minutes. Add seasonings, strain, and serve. carrots 2 slices onion sprig parsley + cup rice 4 tablespoons butter
A plain cream-of-cabbage purée: cabbage boiled and sieved, then bound with a butter-and-flour roux and scalded milk. The method survives intact even though several of the quantities do not.
- Missing quantitiesThe list gives butter, flour and seasonings but no amount of cabbage, water or milk, and no quantity for the onion the method calls for. A small head of cabbage, enough water to cover, and 2 to 3 cups of scalded milk against the 2 tablespoons flour would give a workable soup, but this is a guess: the original figures cannot be recovered from the text.
- Fractions to assume"teaspoon pepper" almost certainly stood for a fraction of a teaspoon, as did the cayenne, which is measured in "few grains" — a pinch. Season at the end and taste rather than following the list.
- Scalded milkScalding means heating milk to just below a simmer, until it steams and the surface trembles. With pasteurized milk it is no longer necessary for keeping quality, but adding hot milk to a hot roux still gives a smoother sauce with less lumping.
- Cook the cabbage briefly"Until tender" for a purée means 10 to 15 minutes, not the long boil older kitchens gave cabbage. Overcooked cabbage turns sulphurous, and in a milk soup that flavour is impossible to hide.
- Two strainingsThe cabbage is pressed through a sieve, and the finished soup strained again. A blender replaces the first step; the second straining is worth keeping, since it catches onion fibre and any flour that failed to disperse.
- CurdlingOnce the milk is in, keep the pot below a simmer. Cabbage cooking water is mildly acidic, and hard boiling can cause the milk to separate.
- YieldWith the cabbage, water and milk quantities missing, the yield cannot be fixed from the text.
Lowney's, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, published cookbooks in the same spirit as the other New England food companies of the era, and its soup chapter follows the domestic-science school then centered on the Boston Cooking School: a vegetable, a white sauce, and a sieve. This cream-of-vegetable formula oand scalked milk, strain u2014 was applied to celery, carrot, corn, pea and cabbage alike, and it gave cooks a way to serve a cheap winter vegetable at the head of a formal meal. Cabbage carried humbler associations than most of them, and a pale cream soup may have been one way of presenting it more formally.