Mushroom Soup
3 tablespoons flour 1 cup cream salt and pepper celery salt Clean and chop mushrooms; cook in water until tender; press through a sieve. Melt butter; add flour, white stock; cook five minutes; add mushroom mixture, cream, and seasonings; reheat, strain, and serve. 1 chicken cut in pieces 1 cup salt pork cubes 1 cup onion 4 quarts water 4 tablespoons flour salt, pepper, cayenne 1 cup cream
The text as printed has lost part of its ingredient list — the mushrooms, butter and stock quantities are missing, and the block beginning "1 chicken cut in pieces" belongs to the next recipe in the section, almost certainly a chicken soup or purée. What survives is a standard velouté-style mushroom soup, and it can be reconstructed with confidence.
- The missing quantitiesComparable soups of the period pair 3 tablespoons flour and 1 cup cream with something in the region of 1 lb mushrooms, 3 tablespoons butter and 1 quart white stock; this is a reasonable guess rather than a recovered reading. On that basis it would serve about 6. The recipe gives no yield of its own.
- White stockIn a book of this date white stock means an unbrowned veal or chicken stock, mildly seasoned and at most lightly salted. A low-sodium chicken stock is the closest supermarket equivalent, since the recipe is salted at the end.
- The stray chicken listChicken, salt pork, onion, 4 quarts water, flour, cayenne and cream are the makings of a separate soup. Do not add them to the mushroom soup; a whole cut-up chicken in a quart of mushroom purée is not a printing subtlety, it is two recipes run together.
- Cook the flour, do not brown itThe recipe adds flour and stock together and cooks five minutes, long enough to lose the raw flour taste; keep the butter and flour pale before the stock goes in. Colour here turns the soup grey-brown and dulls the mushroom flavour.
- Sieving"Press through a sieve" was the standard purée method here. A blender does it faster, though passing the blended soup through a fine strainer afterwards — as the recipe's final "strain" directs — is still what gives the smooth texture the method is after.
- Reheat, do not boilOnce the cream is in, hold the soup below a simmer. Boiling a cream-and-flour soup risks curdling and flattens the mushroom aroma, which is volatile.
- Celery saltStill sold, still the same thing: ground celery seed cut with salt. It is doing real work in a soup with no aromatics beyond the mushrooms, so season with it before adding more plain salt.
- MushroomsThis expects ordinary cultivated mushrooms, which at this date were cream- or brown-toned rather than the modern white button. Cultivated mushrooms of either sort suit it; cremini give a deeper flavour, and wild mushrooms will overwhelm the delicacy the recipe is built around.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, is one of the many turn-of-the-century cookbooks published by a manufacturer as advertising — the chocolate recipes are the point, and the soups, meats and vegetables are there to make it a usable general cookbook. Its soup chapter follows the pattern familiar from the Boston Cooking School books: a butter-and-flour roux, a white stock, a purée of the flavouring vegetable, and cream at the finish. Cultivated mushrooms were still a relatively recent and comparatively expensive item in American kitchens at this date.