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Spinach Soup No. 3
1 cup chopped cooked spinach 1 quart white stock 2 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 1 cup milk Salt, pepper Add spinach to the stock, heat to boiling point, and rub through a sieve. Thicken with butter and flour cooked together, add milk and seasonings, reheat, strain and serve.
A straightforward velouté-style purée soup: the only real decisions are what stands in for the white stock and how hard you push the spinach through the sieve.
- White stock in a meatless bookWhite stock -- In general cookery "white stock" means veal or poultry bones simmered without browning. If the book is a meatless one, a light vegetable broth simmered and strained pale will serve; avoid the dark brown commercial cubes, which will muddy the colour.
- QuantitiesOne quart is 4 cups. With a cup of milk added, the finished soup comes to roughly 5 cups before reduction — four modest servings, or six as a first course.
- The butter and flour"Cooked together" means a white roux: melt the 2 tablespoons butter, stir in the 3 tablespoons flour and cook two or three minutes over low heat until it smells nutty but has taken no colour. Whisk the hot liquid into it gradually rather than dropping the roux into the pot, or it will lump.
- Sieve, then blenderThe rubbing through a sieve is the period substitute for a blender. A blender or stick blender does it in seconds; the final straining is still worth doing, since spinach can leave fibrous threads.
- Don't overcook the spinachThe cup of spinach is already cooked. Heating it to boiling in the stock is enough to soften it for puréeing — prolonged simmering turns the bright green a dull olive. Purée as soon as it comes up to the boil.
- Reheat gently after the milkOnce the milk is in, keep it below a rolling boil. Spinach is mildly acidic and a hard boil with dairy invites curdling, especially with low-fat milk.
- SeasoningThe original leaves salt and pepper open. Season at the very end, after straining; a grating of nutmeg is a common pairing with spinach and cream, though this recipe does not call for it.
Meatless cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were written for several audiences at once: Lenten and fast-day cooks, vegetarians of the health-reform movement, and ordinary households economising on meat. Numbered variations like "Spinach Soup No. 3" are a signature of the genre — the compiler prints two or three routes to the same dish so the cook can pick according to what is in the larder. The technique itself is a plain velouté: stock thickened with a white roux and finished with milk, a method generally traced to French professional practice and thoroughly domesticated in English and American kitchens by the time this book appeared. Spinach was a natural candidate, being cheap and quick-growing.