Carrot Soup
1½ teaspoons salt few grains cayenne 2 cups water 2 cups scalded milk 2 tablespoons flour Chop enough carrots to make two cups. Cook in water until tender. Press through sieve, reserving liquor. Cook rice in milk in double boiler. Cook onion in butter; add flour and seasonings. Mix carrot mixture with rice and milk and pour on to butter and flour; bring to the boiling point, strain, and serve. Garnish with chopped parsley. If this soup seems too thick, thin with cream or milk.
A pureed carrot soup thickened three ways at once — sieved vegetable, rice cooked in milk, and a butter-flour roux. The printed ingredient list here is incomplete, so a few quantities have to be inferred from the method.
- Missing quantitiesThe method calls for rice, onion, and butter that never appear in the ingredient list, which as printed is incomplete. Comparable soups of this period suggest something like 2 tablespoons rice, 1 small sliced onion, and 2 tablespoons butter — the last matching the 2 tablespoons flour in a standard roux.
- Carrots by volume"Chop enough carrots to make two cups" is roughly 3 to 4 medium carrots, about 9 to 10 oz. Chop them small rather than slicing in coins; they cook faster and press through a sieve with less effort.
- Reserve the liquorThe cooking water carries some of the carrots' flavour. Press the carrots through the sieve and return that water to the pot — the instruction to reserve it is easy to skim past.
- Scalded milkMilk heated to just below boiling, when a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge, around 180F. In the era of raw milk scalding served a hygienic purpose as well as a culinary one.
- Double boiler for the riceRice simmered directly in milk on an open flame scorches on the bottom. The double boiler is doing real work, not being fussy. A heavy pan over the lowest heat with frequent stirring will substitute; count on 25 to 30 minutes for the grains to break down.
- Sieve, or blenderA food mill or fine sieve was the only option in 1907. An immersion blender gives a smoother result in seconds, though the final straining is still worth doing to catch unbroken rice grains and onion fibre.
- Bring just to the boilOnce the roux, milk, and puree are combined, take it to the boiling point and no further. Held at a boil, the flour-and-milk base is liable to catch on the bottom of the pan.
- YieldSomething over a quart of finished soup, depending on how much reduces away — four to six small first-course servings. Thin with milk or cream to the consistency you want; it thickens noticeably as it stands.
Carrot soup thickened with rice and a milk-based roux belongs to the American "cream soup" family that dominated the first courses of respectable meals from the 1880s through the 1920s, standardized largely through the Boston Cooking School and its imitators. The pattern is fixed: a vegetable cooked and sieved, a white sauce of butter, flour, and scalded milk, seasoning limited to salt and cayenne, and a garnish of chopped parsley. Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored cookbooks of the period it surrounded its chocolate recipes with a complete general cookbook to earn a place on the kitchen shelf. The soups chapter is conventional by design — the whole point was that a household could cook from the book every day, and encounter the Lowney name each time it did.