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Cream of Dasheen Soup
6 medium-sized dasheens 1 pint milk 1/2 cup cream 2 teaspoons salt 1/4 teaspoon onion salt Clean the dasheen by removing the coarse, fibrous covering. Wash, and put to cook in boiling water. When tender, which will require twenty to twenty-five minutes' cooking, remove from the water, peel, and mash through a colander. Add the hot milk and cream slowly, and heat to the boiling point. Add the salt and onion salt. One tablespoon butter and one-half cup milk may be used in place of the cream. It will then be advisable to add a little flour for thickening.
CREAM OF VEGETABLE OYSTER SOUP NO. 1 1 1/2 cups diced vegetable oysters 2 cups water 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 1 cup cream 2 cups milk Cook the vegetable oysters in the boiling, salted water. When tender, take one-third of them, and put the remainder through the colander. Add to this puree the diced vegetable oysters. Heat the milk and cream in the double boiler, and add to the hot puree. Salt, and serve at once. An additional cup, scant, of milk and two tablespoons of butter may be used in place of the cream if desired.
CREAM OF VEGETABLE OYSTER SOUP NO. 2 1 1/3 cups sliced vegetable oysters 2 cups water 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 3 tablespoons flour 3 tablespoons butter 2 cups milk Cook the vegetable oysters in two cups water. Take out one-third of them. Put the remainder through the colander, and add this pulp to the sliced vegetable oysters. Add the white sauce, made by rubbing together the butter and flour until smooth, and adding the warm milk slowly. Add salt, and cook for ten minutes in a double boiler. After combining the white sauce with the vegetable oysters, measure, and add water sufficient to make one quart.
Three cream soups in sequence, all built on the same plan: boil a root, push it through a sieve, and let it thicken hot milk. Two of the ingredients go by names no longer used at the market.
- Dasheen is taroDasheen is the corm of Colocasia esculenta, sold today as taro or, for the smaller side-corms, eddo in Caribbean, West African and Asian groceries. Choose firm corms with no soft or grey patches; the flesh should be creamy white to faintly purple-flecked.
- Cook it throughRaw taro is full of needle-shaped calcium oxalate crystals that irritate mouth and skin, and thorough cooking is what relieves the irritation. Twenty to twenty-five minutes suits small corms; larger ones need 30-40 minutes, until a knife meets no resistance at the centre. Wear gloves when peeling raw taro if your hands are sensitive.
- Six medium dasheensAn open measure, and corm size varies widely. Thin with more milk if the puree sets too stiff.
- Vegetable oyster is salsifyAlso sold as oyster plant, a long pale taproot with a faint shellfish note when cooked, which is where the name comes from. Scorzonera, the black-skinned relative, works the same way. Scrape and hold the cut pieces in water with lemon juice or vinegar, as the flesh discolours within minutes.
- Through the colanderA colander here means forcing the cooked root through with a wooden spoon or pestle. A food mill or potato ricer does the same job faster. Avoid a blender or food processor with taro, which turns it gluey.
- Cream substitutionsThe butter-and-milk swap offered in the dasheen soup and in No. 1 amounts to a thin white sauce standing in for cream; No. 2 is built on that white sauce from the start. If you use cream, heat gently: at a hard boil the starchy puree can catch and scorch on the pan bottom.
- Double boilerCalled for in both vegetable oyster soups, to keep milk from scorching. A heavy saucepan over low heat with steady stirring is adequate, but the water bath is genuinely more forgiving for the ten-minute cook in No. 2.
- Yield and seasoningNo. 2 is explicitly made up to one quart; the other two run somewhat larger. Two teaspoons of salt in the dasheen soup is on the high side by current taste; start with one and adjust. White pepper and a scrape of nutmeg suit both roots.
Dasheen appears in a 1910s American cookbook because the United States Department of Agriculture was actively promoting it at the time. Corms were introduced from the Caribbean and Pacific and trialled in Florida and the Gulf South as a starch crop for wet ground where potatoes failed, and government bulletins circulated recipes to build a market that never quite materialised outside immigrant kitchens. Salsify, the "vegetable oyster," had the opposite trajectory: a standard European kitchen-garden root since the seventeenth century, common in nineteenth-century American seed catalogues, and valued in meatless cooking precisely because its flavour was said to echo oysters, letting a cook produce something like the era's beloved oyster stew without shellfish.