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Cream of Potato Soup No. 3
2 medium-sized potatoes 1 pint of milk and potato water 2 teaspoons grated onion 1/4 teaspoon celery salt 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons chopped parsley Wash, pare, and slice the potatoes. Cook in sufficient boiling water to cover, until tender. Drain the liquid into a pint measure, and mash the potatoes. Add sufficient milk to fill the pint measure, and turn into the mashed potatoes. Add the grated onion, salt and celery salt to the liquid. Rub the flour and butter together, and pour over it, stirring meanwhile the hot liquids. Cook until thickened. Add this to the mashed potatoes, cook five minutes and add the chopped parsley just before serving.
A small, plain potato soup built on the water the potatoes cooked in, which carries most of the flavour. The instructions run in an odd order; read them through before starting.
- The hinge: don't throw out the potato waterThe starch in the cooking liquid is what gives this soup body and flavour. Drain it into a measuring cup, then top up with milk to reach one pint total.
- Beurre manié, not a rouxRubbing the flour and butter together raw gives you a beurre manié, whisked into the hot liquid to thicken it. Add it in small pieces while stirring or it will lump; the flour taste cooks out in the five-minute finish.
- Reading the muddled orderThe text contradicts itself: the pint of liquid is turned into the mashed potatoes, then seasoned, thickened and added to them a second time. It is simpler to mash the potatoes, stir in the seasoned pint, bring to a simmer, and whisk in the butter-flour paste there.
- QuantitiesA pint is 2 cups; "2 medium-sized potatoes" is roughly 12 oz to 1 lb of a floury variety such as russet or Maris Piper. Waxy potatoes will not mash smooth and give a gluey rather than creamy body.
- Grated onionTwo teaspoons means onion grated on a box grater to a pulp with its juice, not chopped. It melts into the soup without needing to be sweated first.
- Celery saltStill sold, but salt content varies by brand. Add the half teaspoon of plain salt last and taste, since the celery salt plus the potato water may already be enough.
- YieldAbout a pint and a half once the potato is in: two modest servings, or four cups' worth if you stretch it with extra milk. It thickens considerably on standing and will want thinning when reheated.
Books titled Meatless Cookery are often associated with the First World War, when the U.S. Food Administration urged households toward meatless and wheatless days so that meat and white flour could be shipped to the troops and to Europe, though meatless and vegetarian titles were also published for health and dietary reasons before American entry in 1917. Potato soups are everywhere in that literature because potatoes were among the starches cooks were actively encouraged to eat more of, being bulky, cheap and hard to ship abroad, alongside corn, oats, rye and barley as wheat substitutes. The habit of numbering variants "No. 1, No. 2, No. 3" runs through these collections. Building the soup on the potato cooking water rather than a meat stock is the whole point of the recipe, and also good practice on any day of the week.