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Cream of Potato Soup No. 1
4 cups milk 1 onion 1 cup mashed potato 2 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons butter Pepper Scald milk with onion in it, remove onion, and add milk slowly to the mashed potatoes. Melt the butter, add the flour, and pour on gradually the hot mixture. Cook thoroughly, and season to taste. A little celery salt may be added, and finely chopped parsley sprinkled over top of soup.
A plain white-sauce soup that depends entirely on smoothness: the potato has to be genuinely lump-free before the milk goes in, or no amount of cooking will fix it.
- The hingeAdd the scalded milk to the mashed potato a little at a time, working it smooth after each addition, exactly as directed. Dumping it in at once leaves lumps that will not disperse later.
- ScaldingScald means heating the milk to about 180F, until it steams and a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge. The whole onion sits in it while it heats to give flavour -- the recipe sets no time -- then comes out.
- Mashed potatoUse plain mashed potato with no milk or butter already beaten in, or the soup turns heavy. Roughly one large russet, boiled and riced, gives a cup. Cold leftover mash works but should be warmed and loosened first.
- Order of operationsThe recipe has you melt the butter, stir in the flour, then pour on the hot potato-milk gradually. Whisk constantly, and give the flour enough gentle cooking to lose its raw taste -- this is what 'cook thoroughly' is doing.
- "Cook thoroughly"This means simmering, not boiling hard. A milk-based soup on high heat scorches on the bottom and skins on top. Low heat and a heavy pan, stirring often.
- ConsistencyTwo tablespoons of flour to four cups of liquid gives a fairly thin soup, thickened as much by the potato as the roux. Thin with a little more hot milk if it tightens as it stands.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt is a starting point for four cups of milk; taste at the end. The celery salt is worth adding, as celery seed or a rib of celery in the scalding milk does the same job with less sodium.
- YieldAbout five cups finished, serving four as a first course or two as a main. Best eaten the day it is made; reheat gently without boiling.
Cream soups of this type were a staple of American domestic-science cookery in the early twentieth century, and the numbering of the recipe here is telling: books like this one offered several versions of the same soup. The method is the standard white sauce of the cooking schools, butter and flour cooked together and let down with scalded milk, applied to whatever vegetable was at hand. Milk, butter and potato supplied protein and substance. The whole onion scalded in the milk and then removed is a period habit worth noticing, a way of borrowing flavour without texture or colour, and it seems to have been common in the cream soup chapters of the era.