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Russian Beet Soup
1 cup beet pulp 1 cup cream 2 1/2 cups water 1 tablespoon cornflour 1 tablespoon sugar 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 4 teaspoons lemon juice Cook three medium-sized beets until tender, put them through a colander, add the cream, water, sugar and salt, and put in the double boiler. To the flour add a cup of hot liquid from the double boiler, stirring constantly to make a smooth paste. Return to double boiler, and stir until it thickens slightly. Remove from the fire, and add the lemon by spoonfuls.
A smooth cream-of-beet soup rather than the chunky borscht most cooks expect. It comes together quickly once the beets are cooked, and the only real difficulty is keeping the lemon from breaking the cream.
- The hinge: lemon last, off the heatAcid added to hot cream over direct heat will curdle it. The instruction to remove the pan from the fire and add the juice by spoonfuls, stirring between each, is what keeps the soup smooth, and it should be followed exactly.
- Beet pulpThree medium beets, boiled or roasted whole until tender and rubbed through a colander or sieve, give roughly the cup called for. Cook them unpeeled with an inch of stem left on so they do not bleed out; the skins slip off under cold water afterwards.
- CornflourIn a book of this period the word usually means cornstarch, not the finely ground maize meal sold as corn flour today. One tablespoon of cornstarch thickens about three and a half cups of liquid to a light, barely coating consistency, which is what "thickens slightly" describes.
- Tempering the starchThe recipe borrows a cup of hot liquid to slurry the starch rather than mixing it cold. Whisk hard, return it to the pot, and hold it hot for two or three minutes so the starch loses its raw taste and reaches full thickening power.
- The double boilerStandard equipment when the book was written and worth keeping here, since a cream-and-starch soup scorches easily over direct flame. A heatproof bowl set over simmering water works; so does a heavy saucepan on low heat with constant stirring.
- CreamPeriod "cream" was generally lighter than the heavy cream sold today, nearer light cream or half-and-half, though it varied a good deal. Heavy cream will make the soup noticeably richer and more prone to breaking when the lemon goes in.
- Yield and servingSomething over a quart, serving four as a first course. It is good hot, and also chilled.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a wave of American books that treated vegetarian and fast-day cooking as ordinary household work rather than a fringe cause, and its soup chapter leans heavily on vegetables enriched with milk, cream and eggs to supply what meat stock normally would. Beet soups of the barszcz and svekolnik family are traced to the Slavic and Baltic kitchen, where they run from clear fermented broths to thick cold soups slackened with soured milk; the sweet-sour balance of sugar against lemon here stands in for the fermented beet sour, or kvas, that older versions relied on and that few American cooks outside Eastern European immigrant households would have kept on hand. Calling it simply "Russian" seems to have been common shorthand in English-language cookbooks well before the varieties of Eastern European beet soup were distinguished for Anglophone readers.