Worcestershire
Cook cress, butter and onion together five minutes; add flour and seasonings. When smooth add milk in which extract has been mixed, cook twenty minutes, strain, serve, and garnish with whipped cream.
This is the method half of a cream soup; the ingredient list that stood above it in the book has not carried over, so the quantities have to be reconstructed. What follows is what the instructions assume a 1900s cook already knew.
- No quantities survive hereThe text gives a sequence, not amounts. For a standard cream soup of this type, figure roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 3 to 4 cups milk to a generous bunch of cress and one small onion; treat that as a reconstruction, not the book's own measure.
- CressWatercress, sold in bunches then as now. Use leaves and tender stems, chopped; the coarse lower stems can go in since the soup is strained anyway.
- "Extract"Most likely meat extract: the thick, dark beef pastes sold as Liebig's, Armour's or Bovril. A teaspoon dissolved in a little of the warm milk is a reasonable guess, though the surviving text gives neither the kind nor the amount. Modern equivalents are beef bouillon concentrate or a spoonful of demi-glace.
- The name is the puzzleGiven the book's title for it, Worcestershire sauce may be intended rather than, or alongside, meat extract. If you use the sauce, add it at the very end off the heat: its vinegar may curdle hot milk if it is stirred in early and cooked twenty minutes.
- Five minutes, gentlyThe butter, cress and onion are sweated, not browned. Keep the heat low enough that the onion stays pale, or the finished soup turns muddy grey-brown instead of green.
- Cook the flour before the milk goes in"Add flour and seasonings. When smooth" means let the roux bubble a minute so the raw starch cooks out. Then add the milk gradually and stir until it thickens before it goes to a simmer.
- Twenty minutesLong by current standards for a delicate green soup — it is there to cook out the flour over low heat. Stir often and keep it below a boil; a scorched milk base cannot be rescued. If you want a brighter colour, hold back a handful of cress and add it in the last two minutes.
- Straining and the creamPushed through a sieve, this is a smooth, thin soup rather than a purée. The whipped cream garnish is unsweetened and unflavoured, spooned on at the table so it floats; whip it only to soft peaks or it sits on the surface like a lid.
- YieldAbout four small soup-plate servings — a first course, not a meal.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer that, like Baker's and Rumford, published a general cookbook partly to keep its name in the kitchen. Its soup chapter reflects the American middle-class table of the early 1900s, where the cream soup — a butter-and-flour roux let down with milk and flavoured with one vegetable — had become the standard opening course, cheaper and quicker than a long-simmered stock. The bottled meat extract called for here belongs to the same moment: Liebig's Extract of Meat and its rivals had made concentrated beef flavour a pantry staple by the 1890s, and it was often reached for to give a milk-based soup some savoury depth without a stockpot. Naming a dish after an English county or sauce is often said to have been a gesture toward refinement in books of this kind, though how much it reveals about the audience, and how little about any connection to Worcestershire itself, is harder to say.