Rice Soup
1 cup rice 2 cups cream 6 cups cold water 1 small onion 1 green pepper 1 teaspoon chopped parsley 4 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour salt, cayenne, and nutmeg 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce Cook rice, onion, and pepper in cold water until rice is tender. Press through a sieve. Melt butter, add flour, cream, and seasonings; boil five minutes. Combine mixtures. Add parsley and serve. 1 cup chopped sorrel 1 pint cold water 2 tablespoons butter 1 cup milk 4 tablespoons flour
A creamed rice purée thickened twice over — once by the starch of the rice itself, once by a butter-flour roux. The proportions are generous with cream; the seasoning is where the character lives.
- The stray ingredient listThe last five items — sorrel, water, butter, milk, flour — do not belong to this soup; they appear to be the opening ingredient list of the following recipe, run on in the transcription. Ignore them entirely here.
- Sieving is the whole methodPressing the cooked rice, onion and pepper through a sieve is what makes this a soup rather than rice in broth. A food mill or a blender followed by a strainer does the same job in a fraction of the time; the texture should be smooth and pourable, not grainy.
- Green pepperIn 1907 this means a sweet bell pepper, not a chilli. One medium pepper, seeded and roughly chopped, cooked with the rice from the start.
- Boil the cream sauce five minutesLong enough to cook out the flour taste, but keep the heat moderate and stir — two cups of cream over direct heat will catch and scorch, and a scorched cream base cannot be rescued.
- Cayenne and nutmegNo quantities are given. A pinch of each is the intent; nutmeg in particular should be barely detectable behind the cream. Season the sauce before combining, then correct the salt at the end when the rice has diluted everything.
- ConsistencyOne cup of rice to six cups of water gives a fairly loose purée; the body of the finished soup comes as much from the roux and cream as from the rice. Thin with milk or light stock if it thickens on standing.
- YieldRoughly two quarts, serving six to eight as a first course. It reheats poorly at a hard boil — warm it gently.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and, as house-brand cookbooks of the era often did, it wrapped a full general-purpose recipe collection around the product it was selling. The soups chapter owes nothing to chocolate and everything to the New England cream-soup tradition common in American middle-class cookery in the first decade of the twentieth century — a vegetable or grain cooked soft, pressed through a sieve, and bound with a butter-and-flour sauce enriched with cream. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book had codified that formula a decade earlier and it appears in dozens of variations under names like cream of celery and cream of corn. The Worcestershire sauce and cayenne here reflect the period's growing fondness for a bottled savoury note in otherwise bland cream dishes.