Sea Kale Puree
1 pound seakale 1/2 ounce butter 1 pint boiling water 1/2 ounce flour 1 pint milk Cut the sea kale into small pieces, and cook in the butter for five minutes. Add the water, and cook until the seakale is tender. Rub through a sieve. Mix the flour smoothly with a little cold milk. Put the rest of the milk and the seakale into a saucepan; when boiling, add the flour. Cook for ten minutes, season and serve.
A plain Edwardian vegetable soup that depends entirely on getting hold of sea kale, and on not letting the milk catch once the puree goes in.
- Sea kale, and what to use insteadSea kale is Crambe maritima, a coastal brassica grown for its blanched winter shoots; a few specialist growers and market gardens still sell it in late winter. Wild colonies are scarce and declining, and in Britain uprooting any wild plant without the landowner's permission is illegal, so buy it rather than gather it. Blanched chard stalks, cardoon or trimmed young leeks give a comparable soup, and it is often likened to asparagus in flavour.
- The half-ounces1/2 ounce butter is 1 tablespoon; 1/2 ounce flour is a scant 2 tablespoons. Both are small by modern soup standards; 1/2 ounce of flour to a pint of milk is the old ratio for a thin sauce, so the soup will be barely thickened.
- PintsIf the source uses imperial measure a pint is 20 fluid ounces, about 2 1/2 cups; a US pint is 16. Either works, but the smaller US pint gives a slightly thicker, less milky soup.
- Cooking the kaleFive minutes in butter should soften without browning; sea kale colours easily and browned brassica tastes of cabbage water. After the water goes in, 10–15 minutes is usually enough for tenderness.
- Sieve or blender"Rub through a sieve" was the usual way to get a smooth puree before electric blenders. A blender does it in seconds, but pass the result through a fine sieve anyway -- sea kale stalks carry stringy fibres that a blender shreds rather than removes.
- The flour slurryMixing the flour with cold milk and adding it to boiling liquid is the hinge here. Add it in a thin stream while whisking, then keep the pan just below a simmer for the ten minutes; a milk soup left at a hard boil over direct heat will scorch on the bottom and taste of it.
- SeasoningThe book says only "season". Salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg suit it; a squeeze of lemon at the end lifts the flat sweetness of the milk.
- YieldRoughly 1 to 1 1/2 quarts depending on which pint you use: four to six small first-course servings.
Sea kale grows wild on the shingle beaches of northern and western Europe, where it was gathered long before anyone cultivated it; garden growing is generally traced to eighteenth-century England, and by the Victorian period it was a standard forced winter vegetable, blanched under terracotta pots or heaped sand so the shoots came up pale and mild. Its appearance in a book called Meatless Cookery is unsurprising, though how far it was a everyday market vegetable and how far a genteel delicacy is harder to say.