Vegetable Soup
1 cup chopped carrot 1 cup chopped turnip 1 cup chopped celery 1/2 cup butter or pork fat 2 cups chopped potato 1 cup chopped onion 4 cups milk salt, pepper, cayenne Parboil potatoes ten minutes. Melt butter, add vegetables, cook ten minutes, stirring occasionally. Add water and boil until vegetables are tender. Season, strain, garnish with parsley, and serve. 2 cups black beans 8 cups water Black Bean Purée 4 tablespoons chopped pork 3 tablespoons chopped onion 2 tablespoons flour 1 lemon sliced 1½ teaspoons salt 6 cloves teaspoon mustard 2 tablespoons butter 1 hard-cooked egg Soak beans over night, drain, add water, and cook until tender - four or five hours. Press through a sieve; cook pork in a frying pan; add onion, cook five minutes; add bean mixture; melt butter; add flour and seasonings; combine mixtures; strain. Garnish with egg cut in slices and lemon.
A ham bone cooked with the beans is considered by many to be an improvement.
Split Pea Purée 2 cups split peas 8 cups water 3 tablespoons chopped onion 1 teaspoon salt 2 cups milk 2 drops tabasco sauce 4 tablespoons chopped pork 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour Soak peas over night, drain, cook until tender. Cook onion and salt pork together ten minutes; add to pea mixture. Press through a sieve, melt butter, add flour, milk, seasonings, and cook five minutes. Combine mixtures and serve.
Lentil Purée Prepare the same as split pea purée, substituting one and one half cups lentils for split peas.
Four soups printed as a single block: a vegetable soup, black bean and split pea purées, and a one-line lentil variant. The typesetting has dropped some fractions, so read the ingredient lists sceptically before you start.
- The missing fractions"cup butter or pork fat" in the vegetable soup and "teaspoon mustard" in the bean purée have lost their fractions in the original setting. A quarter cup of fat is right for six cups of chopped vegetables, and a quarter to half teaspoon of dry mustard for two cups of beans.
- Milk or water in the vegetable soupThe ingredient list calls for 4 cups milk but the method says to add water. Either reading works: water gives a clear vegetable broth, milk a thin cream soup. If you use milk, add it after the vegetables are tender and keep it below a simmer so it does not catch or curdle.
- Straining, then garnishingBoth the vegetable soup and the bean purée are strained at the end, so this is a smooth soup, not a chunky one. The chopping is only to speed cooking. A food mill or a blender and a fine sieve does in two minutes what "press through a sieve" meant with a wooden pestle.
- Chopped pork means salt porkThe split pea recipe gives it away by calling the same ingredient "salt pork" in the method. Use fatty salt pork or unsmoked bacon, diced small and rendered slowly; four tablespoons is roughly two ounces.
- Four or five hours is longBlack beans soaked overnight are usually tender in 60 to 90 minutes on the stove, or about 30 minutes at pressure. The long timing may reflect older, drier beans and a slower stove. Cook until they crush easily and no longer.
- The roux is a separate stepIn both purées, butter and flour are cooked together and then combined with the bean or pea mixture. Cook the flour in the butter for a minute or two before adding liquid, or the finished soup tastes pasty.
- Salt goes in lateWith beans and split peas, seasoning is easier to control once they are soft, particularly when you have also used salt pork or a ham bone.
- YieldEach soup makes roughly two quarts, or six to eight servings as a first course. The purées thicken considerably as they cool and will need thinning with water, milk or stock when reheated.
Lowney's was a Boston chocolate company, and its cook book was the sort of promotional volume that manufacturers issued by the thousand around 1900 — a full general cookery book, largely conventional New England fare, with the firm's cocoa and chocolate worked into the sweet chapters. The soup chapter here is pure period orthodoxy: everything sieved smooth, thickened with a butter-and-flour roux, and enriched with salt pork, following the purée-and-cream-soup framework that Fannie Farmer and the Boston Cooking School had made standard in American kitchens. Black bean soup garnished with sliced hard-cooked egg and lemon was one of the most fashionable American soups of the late nineteenth century, associated in particular with hotel and club dining rooms; the lemon and cloves cut the earthiness of the beans, and the recipe suggests a ham bone as "an improvement."