White Soup
2 cups white stock 2 cups cream salt and pepper 1 cup cooked rice 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour Make a white sauce of butter, flour and cream. Add white stock, cooked rice, seasonings; reheat, and serve.
A plain cream soup of the sort that filled the first course of a formal dinner. The whole thing hangs on the roux and on not letting the rice disintegrate.
- White stockVeal or chicken bones simmered without browning, so the liquid stays pale. A light, unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute; avoid dark or heavily roasted stocks, which defeat the point of the name.
- Making the sauce with creamCook the butter and flour together a minute or two without colour, then add the cream gradually off the heat and whisk smooth. Cream thickened this way scorches easily, so keep the pan at a bare simmer and stir the bottom.
- Cream then and nowCream of the period was generally lighter than modern heavy whipping cream, closer to today's light cream or half-and-half. Heavy cream will give a much richer, heavier soup; thin it with extra stock if it cloys.
- The riceCooked rice means plain boiled rice, added at the end only to heat through, as the recipe directs. Simmering it in the soup releases starch and thickens the body.
- Reheat, do not boilOnce the stock and rice go in, bring it only to steaming. A cream soup carrying flour will catch and can break if held at a rolling boil.
- SeasoningWhite pepper is the usual choice in a pale soup, though the recipe says only pepper. Salt at the end, to taste.
- YieldAbout five cups, enough for four small first-course servings. Strain or blend a portion if you want a smoother body.
Lowney's, best known for chocolate, published a general household cookbook in the early twentieth century, and its soup chapter follows the standard American pattern of the day: a white sauce base extended with stock, a formula taught in the Boston cooking-school tradition that Fannie Farmer had made ubiquitous. "White soup" is an old English name, generally traced to eighteenth-century soups thickened with pounded almonds and cream; by 1900 the almonds had gone and the thickening was done with flour and butter, the technique that would later be called a cream soup. The pale colour was the point. A dinner served in courses was expected to open with something light and delicate-looking, and cooks were told to keep the stock clear of browned bones for exactly that reason. Adding cooked rice may well have served as a thrift, a way of using the previous day's boiled rice while giving the soup a little body, though how common the practice was is hard to say.