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Cauliflower Soup No. 1
1 cup cooked cauliflower 3 cups white stock 2 cups milk 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour Salt, pepper Make same as spinach soup.
A short-form entry that assumes you have already read the spinach soup a page or two earlier: a butter-and-flour roux, liquid added gradually, the vegetable pureed in. The proportions are sound, but two things need spelling out.
- The missing methodThe spinach soup it refers to is not reproduced here, but the standard procedure for a soup of these proportions is: melt the butter, stir in the flour and cook a minute without colouring, then add the stock and milk gradually, whisking, and simmer until it thickens. The cauliflower is pushed through a sieve (or blended) and stirred in at the end, then seasoned. Do not boil hard once the milk is in.
- "White stock" in a meatless book"White stock" -- In general cookery of the period white stock meant veal or chicken bones simmered without browning, kept light in colour and flavour so the cauliflower shows through. Avoid anything browned, tomato-heavy or strongly herbal.
- Cooked cauliflowerOne cup cooked, a fraction of a small head raw. Cook it in water or in the stock itself until quite soft, softer than you would want for eating, so it sieves smoothly. Overcooked cauliflower turns sulphurous, so do not take it past the point where a knife goes through easily.
- The roux is deliberately thinTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to five cups of liquid gives a soup that barely coats a spoon. That is intentional for a cream soup of this era. If you want it thicker, increase both fats and flour together rather than reducing the liquid.
- Cooking the cauliflower liquid inIf you boiled the cauliflower separately, use its cooking water as part of the stock measure. It carries most of the flavour and the recipe's short ingredient list gives you nothing else to build on.
- SeasoningThe recipe says only "pepper"; white rather than black will keep the soup unspecked. Salt at the end, since the stock's strength is unknown.
- YieldAbout five cups finished, serving four as a first course. A grating of nutmeg or a spoonful of cream at the table is period-appropriate and much needed.
Cream soups built on a milk-and-roux base rather than meat broth were a staple of early twentieth-century cookery. The formula is essentially a thin bechamel with a pureed vegetable stirred through, and once a cook had learned it for spinach she could produce a dozen soups by substitution, which is exactly why this entry can be three lines long and end with "make same as spinach soup." Cauliflower suited the pattern particularly well because it purees pale and smooth once pushed through a sieve. The numbered title suggests the book offered at least one variant.