Manhattan Soup
1 quart vegetable bouillon 4 tablespoons flour slightly browned 3 tablespoons butter 1/2 cup cream 1/2 cup whipped cream Rub the flour and butter together. Heat the vegetable bouillon, and pour slowly over the flour and butter, stirring constantly. Boil five minutes, add the cream, and reheat. Serve in bouillon cups. Beat the whipping cream until stiff, and season with a few grains of salt; also one-fourth teaspoon sugar. Serve a spoon of the seasoned whipped cream on top of each serving of bouillon.
A browned-flour cream soup built on vegetable stock, from the meatless soup chapter. It is simple, and its success rests almost entirely on how far you take the roux.
- Brown the flour first, separately"Flour slightly browned" means dry-toasting the flour in a skillet over medium heat, stirring, until it smells nutty and turns the colour of pale sand — about 5 minutes. This is what gives the soup its flavour and colour in the absence of meat; skip it and you have plain white sauce.
- Roux ratioFour tablespoons flour to three of butter gives a slightly dry, crumbly paste rather than a smooth one. Rub it together with your fingers or a fork; it need not be a cohesive mass.
- Add the hot liquid slowlyPour the hot bouillon in a thin stream while whisking, or the toasted flour will seize into lumps. The five-minute boil the recipe calls for is real and necessary — it cooks out any raw-flour taste and lets the starch reach full thickening power.
- Do not boil after the cream goes in"Reheat" means bring back to a bare steam rather than a boil. Lighter creams can look curdled if boiled, particularly in a stock with any acidity.
- Vegetable bouillonIn meatless cookery of this period the term generally meant a stock simmered from vegetables and aromatics and then strained. A good low-sodium commercial vegetable stock works; taste before salting.
- The whipped creamCream whipped to soft-to-stiff peaks with a pinch of salt and the quarter teaspoon of sugar the recipe specifies. Add it only at the table, since it slackens on hot soup; the original directs a spoonful on each serving rather than folding it in.
- YieldA quart of stock plus half a cup of cream gives roughly six bouillon cups, which are smaller than soup bowls — roughly 5 to 6 ounces each.
Cream soups thickened with browned flour had to produce savoury depth without meat stock; toasting flour was the cheapest way to get a roasted note into a pot. The name seems decorative rather than descriptive, and "Manhattan" here carries no connection to the tomato-based Manhattan clam chowder that also claimed the word. The float of salted whipped cream reads as a period signature, and it explains the bouillon cup, a small handled vessel meant for a clear or lightly thickened soup drunk almost like tea.