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Cream of Onion Soup
4 onions 2 cups milk 3 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1 cup water Cut the onions in small pieces, and cook in the milk and water. Melt the butter, add flour, adding gradually to the milk mixture. Season with salt and pepper, and strain.
TOMATO SOUP NO. 1 1/2 can tomatoes or 1 pound fresh tomatoes 1 quart butter-bean stock 1/2 ounce tapioca 1/2 teaspoon sugar Pepper and salt Cheese-balls Put the tomatoes and stock into a saucepan, and boil for fifteen minutes; if fresh tomatoes are used, they should be sliced. Rub through a sieve. Return to the saucepan, and bring to boiling point. Add the tapioca, and cook for half an hour. Season, and serve with cheese-balls.
TOMATO SOUP NO. 2 1/2 can tomatoes or 1 pound fresh tomatoes 1/2 ounce chopped onion 1 ounce butter 1 pint milk 1/2 ounce flour 1/2 teaspoon sugar Salt and pepper 1 pint boiling water Melt the butter in a saucepan, and cook the onion in it for five minutes. Add the tomatoes and water, and cook for thirty minutes. If fresh tomatoes are used, they should be sliced and cooked in the butter with the onion. Run the tomatoes through a sieve. Mix the flour smoothly with a little of the milk, and put the rest into the saucepan. When boiling, add the flour, and cook for ten minutes. Add the tomato, and boil. Season and serve.
Three plain white-sauce and vegetable soups from a period when "meatless" meant building body from milk, beans and starch rather than stock. The measurements are casual by weight and by can, so a few need pinning down.
- Onion quantityFour onions in a book of this vintage probably means four medium onions, perhaps a pound once trimmed. That is a lot of onion for 2 cups milk and 1 cup water, though the recipe strains the solids out at the end, so the finished soup is thinner than the ingredient list suggests.
- Milk will scorchSimmering raw onion directly in milk over direct heat invites a skin and a burnt bottom. Cook the onion soft in the cup of water first, then add the milk and hold it just below a simmer while the pieces finish.
- The roux is written backwards"Melt the butter, add flour, adding gradually to the milk mixture" means make a butter-and-flour paste and whisk it into the hot liquid in small additions. Let it cook two or three minutes after the last addition or the soup tastes of raw flour.
- Strain, then decideThe onion soup is strained at the end, which discards all the onion solids and leaves a thin flavoured cream. Modern practice is to blend it smooth and pass it through a sieve instead, keeping the body.
- Butter-bean stockThe cooking liquid from dried butter beans (lima beans), used here as the meat stock substitute. Any mild bean cooking liquid works; a well-salted vegetable stock is the nearest ready equivalent.
- Ounce measures1 ounce butter is 2 tablespoons; 1/2 ounce flour is a scant 2 tablespoons; 1/2 ounce tapioca is about 1 1/2 tablespoons of small pearl or quick-cooking tapioca. The recipe treats "half a can" of tomatoes as equal to 1 pound fresh, so a modern 14- to 16-ounce tin is the closest substitute; the size of the can the author had in mind is not recoverable from the page.
- Tapioca timingHalf an hour suits old-style pearl tapioca, which needs long hydration. Quick-cooking tapioca thickens far faster, in roughly 10 to 15 minutes, and can go gluey if held at a boil for the full thirty.
- Curdling in Tomato Soup No. 2Acid tomato added to boiling milk will break it. Add the sieved tomato to the thickened milk off the heat, stirring, then return it to a gentle simmer rather than the hard boil the text calls for.
- Cheese-ballsThe garnish for Tomato Soup No. 1 is not described on this page; presumably it is given elsewhere in the book. Croutons or a spoonful of grated hard cheese serve the same purpose.
- YieldThe onion soup makes about 3 cups. Both tomato soups are larger, starting from a quart of liquid or more before the tomato goes in, so each gives roughly five to six cups.
Meatless cookbooks proliferated in Britain and the United States around the First World War, when meat was rationed or exhorted away by food-conservation campaigns and "meatless days" were a matter of civic virtue as much as vegetarian conviction; whether this book belongs to that moment is not something the page itself settles. The tell here is the butter-bean stock: rather than water, the cook is directed to the liquid left from boiling dried beans, a cheap way of putting savoury depth into a soup with no bones behind it. The rest of the technique is straight out of the nineteenth-century repertoire of milk-thickened puree soups, in which nearly any vegetable was cooked soft, sieved, and bound with a butter-and-flour liaison, then named cream of whatever had gone in. Tapioca, imported in pearl form from cassava grown in the tropics, was valued because it added body without the flouriness of a roux.