Spinach Soup
2 quarts spinach 6 cups cold water bit of bay leaf 1 teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons chopped onion cayenne pepper and celery salt 3 tablespoons flour ½ cup cream Cook spinach in water thirty minutes. Press through a sieve, scald milk with onion and bay leaf, add butter and flour cooked together, strain, add seasonings, and spinach mixture; cook five minutes and serve. Garnish with beaten cream.
A standard New England cream-of-vegetable soup: a purée thinned with a milk-based béchamel. Two things in the original need attention before you start — a missing ingredient and a cooking time that will cost you the colour.
- The missing milkThe ingredient list has no milk, but the method says to scald milk with onion and bay leaf. The half cup of cream is clearly reserved for the garnish. Figure on 2 to 3 cups of milk to bring the soup to a pourable consistency; 3 tablespoons each of butter and flour is a roux sized for roughly that much liquid.
- Thirty minutes is too longSpinach turns olive-drab and sulphurous well before the half hour mark. Five to eight minutes in the water is enough to make it purée smoothly, and the soup stays green.
- Quantities of spinachTwo quarts means two quarts of leaves loosely measured in a dry measure, not packed — call it roughly three-quarters of a pound to a pound of trimmed spinach, a large supermarket bunch or two bagged clamshells.
- The sievePressing through a sieve was the standard purée method of the period. A blender does it in seconds; pass the result through a fine strainer afterwards for a smoother texture.
- Six cups of cooking waterThat is a great deal of liquid for a pound of spinach. Reduce it hard after cooking, or use less from the start, or the finished soup will be thin no matter how much roux you add. The green cooking water carries flavour and should not be discarded.
- Strain the milkThe straining is there to remove the onion and bay leaf, which are flavourings rather than part of the body of the soup; note that the original places the step after the butter-and-flour mixture has gone into the milk.
- Celery salt and cayenneBoth are seasoning to taste, and both were commercially available when the book appeared. Add the celery salt cautiously if you have already salted the spinach water; a pinch of cayenne is enough to lift the flavour without registering as heat.
- Beaten creamUnsweetened cream whipped to soft peaks, spooned on at the table. It should not be stiff, and it should go on just before serving or it will slacken into the hot soup.
- YieldAbout six cups finished, serving four as a first course.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer — one of many turn-of-the-century cookbooks underwritten by a food business, a context that may account for the generous chocolate chapter alongside the otherwise conventional general recipes. This soup belongs to the class of cream purées that dominated American soup courses in the Boston Cooking School era: a vegetable cooked soft, sieved, and bound with a butter-and-flour roux loosened with milk infused with onion and bay. The formula is nearly identical whatever the vegetable — asparagus, celery, pea, tomato. The soup is finished with a garnish of unsweetened whipped cream, floated rather than stirred in.