Turnip Soup
onion 4 cups scalded milk 4 tablespoons butter teaspoon pepper Mix turnip, potato, and scalded milk. Melt butter, add flour, salt, and pepper; when well blended add turnip mixture and onion cut in small pieces. Cook in double boiler twenty minutes, stirring occasionally; strain and serve. 3 cups chopped cress 4 tablespoons butter
The text as printed here has lost part of its ingredient list to the scanner — the turnip, potato and flour quantities are gone, and a stray line from the next recipe (the chopped cress) has been swept in at the end. What survives is a plain white cream soup, and the method is complete enough to work from.
- The missing quantitiesOf the ingredient list, only the milk (4 cups), the butter (4 tablespoons) and a partial pepper measure survive, plus the bare word "onion" with no quantity attached. A plausible reconstruction along Boston-school lines would run something like 2 cups cooked mashed turnip, 1 cup cooked potato, a small onion, 4 tablespoons flour and roughly a teaspoon of salt to 4 cups milk. Treat that as a reconstruction, not as what the book said.
- The stray line"3 cups chopped cress 4 tablespoons butter" belongs to the recipe that followed on the page. Ignore it here.
- Turnip and potato go in cookedThe instruction to mix turnip and potato with scalded milk assumes both have already been boiled and mashed — the twenty minutes in the double boiler is for thickening and flavour, not for cooking raw root.
- Scalded milkHeat until it steams and small bubbles ring the pan, around 180F. Adding hot milk to the hot roux keeps the sauce from going lumpy.
- Why a double boilerA milk-and-flour soup over direct heat scorches on the bottom and the burnt taste carries through the whole pot. A heavy saucepan on low heat with steady stirring does the same job faster if you are watching it.
- Strain and serveThe straining is what makes this a soup rather than a mash — press the solids through a sieve so the turnip flavour stays but the fibre does not. A blender gives a smoother, thicker result that the period cook could not have got.
- Turnip pungencyTurnip sulphur compounds sharpen with long cooking. Boil the turnip separately until just tender, drain, and do not let the finished soup sit over heat much past the twenty minutes.
- YieldOn the reconstructed quantities, roughly six cups, serving four to six as a first course.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) came from the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like several confectioner-sponsored books of the era it hedged its promotional purpose by printing a full general cookbook around the chocolate chapters. Its soup section is squarely in the Boston Cooking School manner: a butter-and-flour roux, scalded milk, a cooked vegetable pulp, and a double boiler to hold it. That template produced dozens of near-identical cream soups — corn, spinach, cress, turnip. This is why the cress recipe sitting next to this one begins the same way. Turnip was the cheap winter root of the Northeast, stored in cellars through to spring, and a cream soup was one of the ways it reached the table.