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Oatmeal and Mushroom Soup
3 tablespoons butter 1 medium-sized onion 1/2 cup oatmeal 1 teaspoon salt 1 quart water 1 pint milk 1/2 cup chopped mushrooms Peel the onion, and chop finely. Place in the inner portion of the double boiler with the butter, and cook fifteen to twenty minutes. Then add the oatmeal and the boiling water. Cook directly over the flame for about ten minutes. Then place in the double boiler, and cook from two to three hours. Rub through a colander, and add the milk. When thoroughly heated, add the chopped mushrooms and salt. The mushrooms are somewhat improved in flavor by broiling a few minutes before adding to the soup. If desired, a spoon of whipped cream may be added to each serving.
A thrifty cream-style soup built on oatmeal rather than flour or potato. Most of the work is unattended, but the timings assume a different oat and a coal range.
- Which oatmealIn a book of this vintage "oatmeal" generally means steel-cut or coarse-ground oats, not the modern quick-cooking rolled flake. Steel-cut oats will stand up to the long cooking; rolled oats will collapse into paste in well under an hour, so cut the double-boiler stage to about 30 minutes if that is what you have.
- The long cook is about texture, not safetyLong, slow cooking in a double boiler was common for grain soups on a range that stayed lit. The purpose is to break the oats down completely so they will pass through a sieve. On a modern stove, a heavy saucepan over the lowest heat with occasional stirring should reach much the same point in around an hour with steel-cut oats.
- Sweating the onionFifteen to twenty minutes with the butter in the top of a double boiler gives a soft, sweet onion with no browning at all. A covered saucepan over low heat does the same in ten minutes; do not let it colour, as the soup is meant to stay pale.
- Rub through a colanderA colander with holes will not do much here; a fine sieve or a conical chinois, pressed hard with a ladle, will give a smoother result. A blender does it in seconds, though it will also aerate the soup slightly.
- The mushrooms go in lastThey are added after the milk is hot and are barely cooked. Broiling them first, as the note suggests, is worth doing: it drives off water and concentrates the flavour, which matters because half a cup of raw chopped mushroom in six cups of liquid is a faint presence otherwise.
- Do not boil after the milkOnce the milk is in, keep the soup below a simmer. A starchy oat purée scorches readily on a direct flame, and boiled milk will throw a skin and a cooked flavour.
- SaltOne teaspoon for roughly six cups of liquid is light by current habits, particularly with unsalted butter. Taste after the mushrooms go in and adjust.
- YieldSix cups of liquid go in, giving roughly five to six cups of soup, or four to six servings as a first course. The whipped cream spooned on top would have been unsweetened, and only lightly whipped -- just enough body to sit on the surface.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a wave of American cookbooks in which meat and wheat flour give way to oats, barley and cornmeal — a shift variously framed, in books of this kind, around health and diet as much as around household economy. Oatmeal here is doing double duty: it thickens the soup, replacing a wheat-flour roux, and it supplies the substance that a meat stock would otherwise give. Oat-thickened broths have a much longer pedigree in Scottish and northern English cooking, where oats were the everyday grain and a handful stirred into stock was ordinary practice. The mushrooms and the spoonful of whipped cream are the concession to the table, turning a plain grain pottage into something that could open a dinner.