Celery Soup
2 cups scalded milk 1½ teaspoons salt 1 blade of mace cayenne celery salt Chop celery; cook in water until tender. Cook onion and mace in milk twenty minutes; strain. Melt butter; add flour and seasonings. Combine celery and milk mixtures, thicken with butter and flour cooked together, and cook five minutes and serve.
NOTE. - Pieces of celery not suitable for the table may be utilized for this soup. The leaves and root of celery make a very good soup.
A plain white celery soup thickened at the end with a butter-and-flour paste rather than started from a roux. The method is sound; the proportions need reconstructing.
- Quantities as printedOnly the milk (2 cups), salt (1½ teaspoons), mace, cayenne and celery salt carry amounts. The celery, water, onion, butter and flour are unmeasured. For 2 cups of milk, work from roughly 2 cups chopped celery cooked in 2 cups water, half a small onion, and 2 tablespoons each butter and flour.
- Infuse, do not boilMilk held twenty minutes with onion and mace should sit just below a simmer, covered. Scalded milk on direct heat will skin over and catch on the bottom, and the scorched flavour carries straight through a pale soup.
- MaceA blade of mace is a strip of the dried aril of nutmeg, sold whole in some spice shops. About ⅛ teaspoon ground mace substitutes, but add it with the flour rather than into the milk, since ground spice will not strain out.
- The thickeningButter and flour cooked together makes a white roux; cook it two or three minutes to lose the raw-flour taste, then add the hot liquid gradually while whisking to avoid lumps.
- Celery salt on top of salt1½ teaspoons salt plus celery salt is generous for four cups of finished soup. Add the celery salt at the end and taste, particularly if the celery cooking water is being kept.
- Keep the cooking waterThe water the celery cooked in holds much of its flavour. Use it as part of the liquid rather than draining it away.
- TextureAs written the soup stays brothy with pieces of celery in it. Blending the cooked celery with its water before combining gives the smooth cream soup most modern readers expect.
- YieldAbout four cups, serving four as a first course.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like most branded cookbooks of its era it surrounded its promotional confectionery chapters with a full course of ordinary household cookery. This soup belongs to the New England school of milk-based cream soups generally traced to the Boston Cooking School tradition associated with Mrs. Lincoln: a vegetable cooked in water, milk infused with onion and a whole spice, and a butter-and-flour binding added last. The closing note is the more telling part of the entry. Celery in 1900 was commonly sold as a table vegetable, blanched and often served raw in a glass celery vase, and the coarse outer ribs, leaves and root were generally surplus to that purpose. Turning them into soup is the standard thrift of a period kitchen, where the stockpot absorbed whatever the dining table rejected.