Squash Soup
3 tablespoons flour 2 cups cooked and strained squash 4 cups milk 2 slices onion bit of bay leaf 3 tablespoons butter salt and cayenne ½ cup cream 2 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon Liebig's beef extract Cook onion in butter five minutes, add flour, extract, seasonings, and milk in which bay leaf has been scalded, cook five minutes; add squash, strain, add two tablespoons of butter, and serve. Garnish with beaten cream. 5 potatoes, boiled 2 tablespoons onion 2 tablespoons carrot 1/4 teaspoon celery salt
A standard cream soup of the period, built on a butter-flour roux and milk rather than stock, with beef extract for savour. The published text runs several ingredient lines together and ends with a stray fragment.
- The trailing lines are not part of this soup"5 potatoes, boiled / 2 tablespoons onion / 2 tablespoons carrot / teaspoon celery salt" belongs to the recipe that followed in the original setting. Ignore it here.
- Butter is listed twice on purposeThree tablespoons make the roux with the onion and flour; the two tablespoons at the end are stirred in after straining, for gloss and richness. Do not combine them at the start.
- SquashThis means winter squash, of which the Hubbard was a New England favourite, baked or boiled, then pressed through a sieve. Two cups of puree is roughly what you get from a butternut or kabocha of about 1½ lb, or from part of a Hubbard. Canned pumpkin puree works if it is unsweetened and unspiced; drain any watery squash well or the soup will be thin.
- Liebig's beef extractA concentrated meat paste sold in a small jar, the commercial forerunner of Bovril and similar savoury extracts. One teaspoon of any modern beef extract or a concentrated bouillon paste stands in directly. Cubes work but are much saltier, so hold back the added salt.
- Scalding the bay leafHeat the milk with the bay leaf until it steams and just films at the edges, then use that milk in the roux. The leaf is removed at the straining stage; it is there for perfume, not for a strong herbal note.
- StrainingThe soup is passed through a sieve after the squash goes in, which removes the onion slices, bay and any fibre. A stick blender will emulsify it but will not remove squash strings — sieve as well if using Hubbard or spaghetti-type squash.
- "Beaten cream"Unsweetened cream whipped to soft peaks, spooned on at the table. The half cup of cream in the ingredient list is that garnish, not a second addition to the pot.
- Heat and yieldOnce the milk is in, keep the soup below a simmer; a milk-based soup with no stock will catch and scorch quickly. Makes about six cups, serving four to six as a first course.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like many branded cookbooks of the era it appears to have carried a full range of household recipes alongside the ones that sold the sponsor's product. Squash soup sits squarely in the New England kitchen: hard winter squashes such as the Hubbard, which had been in American seed catalogues since the mid-nineteenth century, kept for months in a cold cellar and turned up in pies, puddings and thickened soups all winter. The Liebig's beef extract is a marker of the moment ™ Justus von Liebig's meat extract, manufactured commercially from South American cattle from the 1860s, gave home cooks a shelf-stable savoury concentrate at a time when making stock meant a day's work, and it turns up often in cookbooks of the 1900s.