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Cream of Rice Soup No. 1
1/4 cup rice 2 cups water 2 slices of onion 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 3 cups milk 1 tablespoon butter 1/4 teaspoon almond extract Add the rice and onion to the boiling water. Cook until tender; then rub through the colander. Add the butter and hot milk. Reheat, season with salt and almond, and serve.
A plain white cream soup that leans on the rice itself for body rather than a flour roux. Two things decide whether it works: how thoroughly the rice is broken down, and how light a hand you use with the almond.
- Almond extract is the hingeA quarter teaspoon in roughly five cups of soup is already assertive. Add half of it, taste, and stop there if it reads as perfume rather than a background sweetness.
- Rice and cooking timeUse a plain long- or medium-grain white rice, not parboiled or converted, and not basmati, whose own aroma will fight the almond. A quarter cup in two cups of water wants about 20 minutes at a low boil, until it is collapsing rather than merely tender.
- "Rub through the colander"A fine mesh sieve pressed with the back of a ladle gives the intended texture; a blender or immersion blender does it faster, though rice can turn gluey if overworked, so pulse briefly.
- Keep the liquidPush the rice through with its cooking water rather than draining it. That starchy water is the thickener, and the soup will be thin without it.
- Heat the milk separatelyThe instruction to add "hot milk" is deliberate: cold milk poured into hot starch drops the temperature and invites scorching on the reheat. Scald the milk in a separate pan, and once combined bring the soup only to a bare simmer.
- SaltA teaspoon and a half is on the generous side for five cups by current taste. Start with half, season again at the end.
- OnionTwo slices from a medium onion is roughly a rounded tablespoon chopped. It is there for savour, not for onion flavour; it disappears entirely into the purée.
- YieldAbout five cups, or four first-course servings. It thickens noticeably as it stands, so hold back a little milk to loosen it before serving.
Cream soups built on a cooked-and-sieved grain or vegetable, rather than on a butter-and-flour roux, were one of the approaches available to American cooks in the first decades of the twentieth century, and rice was the mildest of the available thickeners. Recipes of this kind had a practical appeal under the wheat- and meat-conservation campaigns of the First World War, when a soup that used rice instead of flour and no stock at all answered the moment. The almond extract is the period signature — a faintly sweet, faintly floral finish was thought to lift an otherwise blank white soup. The numbering of the title suggests the book carried a second version.