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Cauliflower Soup
1 medium-sized cauliflower 4 cups cold water 4 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons flour A 2 tablespoons grated cheese 2 cups scalded milk 2 teaspoons salt 2 slices onion 1 egg yolk few grains cayenne Cook cauliflower in cold water until tender; drain, press through a sieve, add scalded milk. Cook onion in butter, add flour; when well blended, add cauliflower mixture, seasonings; cook five minutes, strain, add yolk of egg slightly beaten, and cheese. 2 cups celery 1 quart cold water 2 slices onion 4 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour
A standard cream-soup formula from the early 1900s: vegetable purée, milk, a butter-and-flour thickening, finished with egg yolk and cheese. A few points need translating, and the text of the next recipe (celery soup) has run onto the end of this one.
- The stray ingredient listEverything from "2 cups celery" onward belongs to the following recipe in the book, not to this one. Ignore it when shopping.
- The mysterious "A"The line "4 tablespoons flour A 2 tablespoons grated cheese" contains a typesetting artifact. Read it as four tablespoons flour and two tablespoons grated cheese.
- Don't discard the cooking waterThe recipe says to drain the cauliflower and thin the purée with scalded milk alone. If you prefer a thinner, more savoury soup, reserve some of the cooking water and use it to let down the purée.
- The egg yolk is the hingeAdd it off the heat, and temper it first with a ladle of hot soup before stirring it back in. Boiling after the yolk goes in curdles the soup into grainy threads with no way back.
- Scalded milkMilk heated to just below boiling, about 180F, when small bubbles ring the pan. With modern pasteurized milk this step is no longer necessary for keeping, but warm milk still blends into a roux without lumping.
- Pressing through a sieveA food mill or a brief run in a blender does the same work in a fraction of the time. Cauliflower purées smooth easily.
- CheeseThe book does not specify a kind. A dry aged cheese grates and melts best here — Parmesan or a firm cheddar. Stir it in with the yolk, off the heat.
- YieldRoughly four to five cups as written, more if you thin it with reserved cooking water; three to five servings as a first course. Season at the end; two teaspoons of salt is generous for this volume and is better added in stages.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and is a complete general manual rather than a chocolate pamphlet. Its soup chapter follows the pattern associated with the Boston Cooking School: a vegetable cooked soft, sieved, and bound with a butter-flour roux and scalded milk — the American cream soup, related to the French velouté and purée soups. The finish of egg yolk and grated cheese, added off the fire, is the French liaison. Cauliflower was a market vegetable of some standing by 1900, grown commercially on Long Island and in California, and cookery writing of the period valued it for its mildness — a blank field on which butter, cheese and seasoning could be arranged.