Potato Soup
salt, pepper, and cayenne 3 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1 quart milk Cook onion and carrot in butter five minutes, add flour, milk, seasonings; cook in double boiler twenty minutes; add mashed potato, and serve after straining. One cup stewed and strained tomatoes or one fourth cup tomato catsup may be used to vary this soup. 1 can tomatoes 2 slices onion 2 sprigs parsley bit of bay leaf few gratings of nutmeg
A cream-of-potato soup of the standard early-twentieth-century type: aromatics softened in butter, a flour-and-milk base cooked gently, mashed potato stirred in at the end. The ingredient list as printed has been scrambled, so read it carefully before shopping.
- The ingredient list is corruptQuantities for the potato, onion and carrot have dropped out of the top of the list, and the block beginning 1 can tomatoes appears to belong to a neighbouring tomato soup. Nothing survives to tell us the original amounts; for a quart of milk, something in the region of 3 medium potatoes (about 2 cups mashed), a couple of slices of onion and a small piece of carrot will give a soup of the right consistency.
- Double boilerThe twenty-minute cooking in a double boiler exists because milk scorches over direct heat on a coal range. A heavy-bottomed saucepan over low heat, stirred, does the same job in about the same time.
- Cook the flourAdd the flour to the butter and let it bubble a minute before the milk goes in; it gives a cleaner flavour than adding the milk at once.
- StrainingStraining is not optional here — it is what turns a lumpy potato-and-milk mixture into the smooth soup intended. Press the solids through a sieve rather than discarding them, or use a stick blender and then strain.
- CayenneThe cayenne is unmeasured, and in a milk-based soup of this kind it is there for warmth rather than heat. An eighth of a teaspoon in a quart is ample.
- The tomato variationAdding a cup of stewed strained tomatoes to a milk base will curdle it if the tomato goes in cold or the soup is boiling. Warm the tomato, add it to the finished soup off the heat, and serve at once.
- YieldSomething over a quart of finished soup, depending on how much potato is used — five or six servings as a first course.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate and cocoa manufacturer, and belongs to the genre of promotional cookbooks that firms issued to keep their product in the kitchen. Its soup chapter is thoroughly in the Boston Cooking School idiom — a butter-and-flour roux, milk rather than stock, a double boiler, and a strainer — which was the house style of American domestic-science teaching around the turn of the century. Potato soup of this kind was cheap, filling and mild.