Home › Soups › Water Cress Soup
Water Cress Soup
2 tablespoons chopped onion 1½ teaspoons salt 1 cup whipped cream 4 cups milk 2 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon beef extract cayenne and sauce
What survives here is an ingredient list that has lost both its method and, oddly, its title ingredient. Treat it as a template for a standard cream soup of the period rather than a set of directions.
- The method is missingNo cooking instructions survive in this entry, and no quantity of water cress is given. Reconstructed from the pattern of cream soups in books of this era: sweat the onion, stir in flour to make a roux, add the scalded milk, simmer with the chopped cress, season, sieve, and finish each cup with whipped cream.
- Butter is unlisted but assumedTwo tablespoons of flour with no fat listed cannot be handled as a roux. Most comparable cream soups of the period pair flour with a similar measure of butter; alternatively the flour was blended smooth with a little cold milk before going into the pot.
- How much cressFor four cups of milk, a large bunch (roughly 4 oz, or two supermarket packets) gives a soup that tastes of cress. The leaves turn drab and bitter with long cooking, so add them in the last few minutes and purée immediately.
- Beef extractThis means concentrated meat glaze sold in jars, Liebig's and Bovril being the familiar brands. A teaspoon is about the strength of one modern stock cube or a teaspoon of beef base; do not substitute liquid broth measure for measure.
- "Sauce"An unqualified "sauce" in a savoury seasoning line of this date most likely means a bottled table sauce, Worcestershire being the commonest. A few dashes, added off the heat.
- The whipped creamIt is a garnish, not a thickener. Whip it unsweetened to soft peaks and spoon it onto the hot soup at the table; stirred into the pot it simply melts and the point is lost.
- YieldFour cups of milk plus garnish makes four generous first-course servings.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer; in the manner often associated with house cookbooks it pushed the firm's cocoa in the dessert chapters and filled out the rest with conventional New England cookery. This soup belongs to the long list of "cream of" purées that dominated American soup chapters between about 1890 and 1930, all built on the same milk-and-roux base with a vegetable stirred through and a spoonful of whipped cream floated on top. Water cress was a natural candidate: it grew wild and cultivated in cold running streams around Boston and New York, came to market in bunches, and was cheap enough to be treated as a garnish crop. The peppery bite that makes it a salad green is exactly what a bland white sauce needed, and the teaspoon of beef extract shows how a meatless soup was given savour.