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Cheese and Vegetable Soup
2 cups of stock 1 tablespoon of finely chopped carrots 1 tablespoon chopped onion 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons of flour 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 1 cup of scalded milk 1/4 cup grated cheese A little mace Cook the vegetables a short time in one-half the butter; add the stock and the mace, boiling fifteen to twenty minutes. Strain, and add the milk. Thicken with flour cooked in the remaining butter. Just before serving, stir in the cheese, and cook until it is melted.
A small cream-of-cheese soup built on a strained vegetable broth. It comes together in under half an hour; the only real risk is overheating the cheese.
- Cheese goes in off the boilStir the cheese in with the pan barely steaming and the heat at its lowest, and take it off as soon as it melts. Held at a simmer, the cheese proteins tighten and squeeze out fat, leaving strings in a greasy broth.
- What "stock" means hereIn a meatless book this is presumably a vegetable stock, water simmered with aromatic vegetables and herbs and then strained. Any unsalted vegetable broth works; if yours is salted, cut the added salt sharply.
- SaltA teaspoon and a half for three cups of liquid is heavy by current taste, especially with grated cheese coming in at the end. Start with half a teaspoon and correct after the cheese has melted.
- The roux is short of fatTwo tablespoons of flour cooked in one tablespoon of butter will be a dry crumb rather than a paste. Either use a tablespoon of flour or raise the butter for the roux to two tablespoons, cooking it a minute or two before whisking in the hot liquid.
- Which cheese"Grated cheese" in recipes of this period generally meant a firm aged cheese such as Cheddar, though Parmesan was also used. Both work; a young mild cheese will thicken the soup without flavouring it.
- MaceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed — warmer and less sharp than nutmeg itself. A pinch of ground mace, or a single blade fished out with the strained vegetables, is the intended amount.
- Scalded milkMilk heated to just under a simmer, when the surface trembles and bubbles ring the pan. The step is usually explained as a legacy of unpasteurised milk; it also brings the milk up to temperature so it blends smoothly into the hot stock.
- YieldClose to three cups, allowing for reduction while the stock boils -- two generous first-course servings, or three small ones. It does not reheat well once the cheese is in, so make what you will eat.
Books titled Meatless Cookery are often associated with a wave of American cookery writing shaped by two pressures: the long-established Catholic and Anglican fast days, and the wartime food conservation campaigns of the First World War, when households were urged to keep meatless days so that meat could go overseas — though books of this title appear before the American wartime campaigns, so the causal link should not be pressed too hard. Soup was where that constraint bit hardest, since a great many nineteenth-century soup recipes began with a meat broth, even alongside the milk, cream and purée soups already in wide circulation, and a whole genre of substitutions grew up around the problem — vegetable stocks, milk and cheese, dried peas and beans, all pressed into service to supply the savoury depth and protein the meat had provided. This recipe is a plain example of the strategy: a carrot-and-onion base simmered for its flavour and then thrown away, a butter-and-flour thickening in the French manner taught in the cooking schools of the period, and grated cheese doing the work of the missing bones. Mace, now a back-of-the-cupboard spice, was standard seasoning for white soups and sauces well into the twentieth century.