Palestine Soup
1/2 can corn 1 quart milk 2 slices onion 3 tablespoons flour 1 cup water 1/2 can tomatoes 1/4 teaspoon soda 1/2 cup butter 2 teaspoons salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Scald the milk with the corn and onion. Mix the flour and water to form a smooth paste, and add the scalded milk.
The instructions as printed stop halfway through, listing ingredients the method never uses. What follows fills the gaps a competent cook would otherwise have to guess at, and flags the one step that decides whether the soup holds together.
- The hinge: soda and the tomatoThe 1/4 teaspoon of soda goes into the heated tomatoes, not the milk. It neutralises enough of the tomato acid to keep the milk from curdling when the two are combined. Add the tomato to the milk base off the heat, at the last moment, and serve at once; holding it hot will curdle it anyway.
- Finishing the printed methodAfter the flour-and-water paste has thickened with the scalded milk, strain out the onion and corn hulls if you want it smooth, then stir in the butter, salt and pepper. Heat the tomatoes separately, stir in the soda, and combine.
- "1/2 can"Period can sizes varied, but canned corn and tomatoes commonly came in cans of roughly a pound to a pound and a quarter, so half a can is on the order of a cup of each. A modern 14.5 oz can, halved, is near enough.
- ScaldingScald means heat the milk to about 180F, just until a skin forms and bubbles ring the pan; do not boil it. Letting the corn and onion stand in the hot milk off the heat will infuse it further.
- The butterHalf a cup is a great deal of butter for a quart of milk and reflects a period taste for enriched cream soups. A quarter cup gives a rounder soup that is still recognisably the same dish.
- ThickeningThree tablespoons of flour slaked in a cup of cold water is a light thickening for a quart of milk; expect a soup that coats a spoon thinly rather than a chowder. Pour the paste into the hot milk in a stream while whisking, then simmer two or three minutes to cook out the raw flour taste.
- YieldSomething under two quarts, which is four generous or six small servings as a first course.
The name is borrowed rather than earned. In nineteenth-century English cookery Palestine soup meant a puree of Jerusalem artichokes, the connection being purely verbal: "Jerusalem" in that vegetable's name is generally traced to a mangling of the Italian girasole, sunflower, the plant being a sunflower relative and no relation to the globe artichoke. Here, though, the name sits atop a corn and tomato cream with no artichoke in sight.